The bright future of the CC in the agile world

This is the second in a two part blog post on Competence Centers. Read the first post here.

Summarising

The role of Competence Centers in large organisations is diminishing. In many organisations there actually is a notion forming that these centers are obsolete. Considered being a hindrance in an ever more agile environment, the roles of the engineers in these CC's are no longer found in job descriptions. But on close examination, we see that where Competence Centers are fading a way, platform teams are arising as the new home for these experts.

Recap

In my previous post I elaborated on the reasons why in today's day and age of business agility the Competence Centers are no longer wanted. The main driver is most likely the notion that we no longer see IT as a way of doing business more efficiently but more effectively. Take this in for a bit and try to see the significance of this difference in looking at IT.

In my post you could read why the CC is obsolete and why maintaining a CC in an organization that is transitioning towards (business) agility is bad practice.

With that said, I want to explain why I think that the CC still has a place in today’s agile organisations, but in an extremely different way than we’re accustomed to. In my post I hinted to this already in the final part of the post.

Competence Center Classification

Typically Competence Centers consist of experts in a particular functional but more often than not, a technical domain. In my experience, large organisations that benefit from a CC have CC’s addressing aspects like application integration (teams of specialist for a specific ESB product), database systems, infrastructure and networking, mobile app development and often it is the case that there is a team that is very proficient in collaboration software like Lotus Notes, Sharepoint etc. What you’ll most likely also encounter is a group of experts organized as a CC for capabilities like testing, project management and coaching on specific topics (like Agile, Scrum and other new hip buzzwords).

I think that coaching is something that is really of extreme benefit to an organization and having a group of coaches in your organization makes perfect sense. I see them more as grease to the software development machinery than a way to make products more efficiently. Good coaches are the conscience of a team, a department, an organization. They continuously and relentlessly challenge an organization on a variety of aspects.

Capabilities and roles

Read my post on ProjectManagers to read more about how I feel about their role in today’s product development environments. Competence Centers around testing and other activities are to some degree, a large degree, a waste of time and effort. Don’t get me wrong, you really need to test, but that should be part of the team’s efforts and not, definitely not part of an external, at least to the Product Team, team. Testing is part of the product development cycle and should be done by the Product Team as an integral part of that cycle. It should also be automated as much as possible. The same goes for Requirements Engineering, who are often smart enough not to call themselves a Competence Center, but still act as one.

About Testing and Requirements Engineering a departments alike, there’s only one thing that makes sense, which is that they should be dissolved, their members become part of product development teams, considering they do have an engineering mindset. And the practice of testing and the further development of a testing practice should be instigated by a Test Engineering Guild. Same obviously goes for Requirements Engineering etc. (Guild: [...] an organization of persons with related interests, goals, etc., especially one formed for mutual aid or protection [...]). I really don’t think that it makes any sense to have a testing department, and it is counter-productive to have such a department and have testing done outside of the Product Team.

Architecture Centers of Excellence

There’s also the typical architecture group in many large organisations. They are often working in isolation of the developers. There’re a multitude of reasons why there is a distance between developer and architect and often it is due to management expectations. This also results in a reputation that is far from good when it comes to architects. Read my post on the role of architecture and architects in an agile environment. I really am convinced that architecture is a key aspect of real business agility, real meaning measurable instead of gut-feeling and goose-bumps. Especially when an organization needs to be agile in order to work on their long term strategy, i.e. adopt business agility as a strategy, they need to have architecture at the core of their product development. Architects should not be in an Architecture Competence Center, often called Architecture Center of Excellence. Instead, they should be extremely close to their user-base and form a guild. Senior management should abolish any formal group of architects and facilitate an architecture guild, up to the point where active architects in such a guild should be openly credited for their practical contributions to their users.

Back to the more technical CC’s.

The Engineering profession

As I mentioned before, CC’s are often consisting of an organisation’s experts. Which makes sense because the whole of the organization should be able to benefit from their expertise. Mind that this notion and the creation of a CC means that the organization understands the problem of scaling. Experts can’t be scaled up, i.e. cloned, so their time is booked as efficient as possible.

Because the CC will become a bottleneck, we need to find something different to solve this problem. And there is a very effective way of doing so.

Technical Competence Centers should be transformed into Platform teams. Platform teams are teams that develop a product, just like Product Teams, but instead of building business products, they create a platform onto which products can be run. The clearest example would be a hosting platform, developed by a traditional infrastructure team. Business products need to be hosted and instead of every Product Team catering for its own infrastructure to host their products, the hosting platform is leveraged. This happens automatically when products are hosted in the Cloud. The likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Google to name three behemoths, understood early on that infrastructure should be a commodity. Since hardware has been a commodity since the advent of the PC, and with the advent of virtualization technologies server hardware joined these ranks, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) has become the norm. Mind that there is still a lot of proprietary hosting platforms out there, we call it on-premise, but what it entails is a sub-standard platform.

Too often I hear that SysAdmins are reluctant to create a true platform of their on-premise systems because of job security. Cynics stating that once they’ve created a user-friendly experience in their data centers as found in the cloud, the SysAdmins are out of a job, are in my opinion wrong. I think that unless infrastructure in the data center is made as accessible to developers like the Cloud is, the SysAdmins will be out of a job. The fact that all around me I hear people nowadays referring to infrastructure as a ‘hosting platform’ instead of server infrastructure as was the case several years ago, means at least to me, that SysAdmins understand this.

But infrastructure is not the only platform to be considered. Take any of the examples of CC’s I gave earlier on in this post. For example the database experts should be working on a database platform instead of creating and maintaining databases. The database team would create a platform that allows for Product Teams to host their database on. It would ensure all compliance aspects, performance, security, resilience etc. The database platform would be an extension of the hosting platform, building on top of it. Consider the situation where the supported databases are SQL Server and MySQL. Product Teams would use these when needing a relational database. But when requiring a NoSQL database, say Mongo, they would do it by themselves on the hosting platform. Who would be better equipped to create a database platform then the database experts that where in the Database CC?

A similar approach would be taken with the former Application Integration CC. They would develop an Integration Platform that other teams can leverage for their integration needs.

From required-to to required-by

The point with a platform is that it is a product as well. So there are users of the platform and it is the Platform Team’s task to ensure that their product is adding value to the business. This means that the platform they create supporting a more agile business, that the platform is user friendly and addressing the user’s needs as much as possible. The user here is the Product Team or the Product Teams building their products using these platforms.

There is an immense shift in mindset here that you should pay considerable attention to. What I mean is that the expert in the CC was required to be invoked in the product development process as part of the process. The product had to be integrated with other products, so the Integration Expert had to be involved. If not only because the means of integration are so complex that mere mortals shouldn’t be allowed to access them. The same goes for databases. Nowadays almost everything needs a database, so in almost every situation the database experts had to be invoked to create one for the Product Team and maintain it.

The CC’s, being the result of rigorous cost-cutting and an efficiency-fetish, have become integral parts of the product development process. Policies dictating their involvement. But platform teams are different. They deliver a product that can be leveraged by Product Teams, but there is always an alternative if not only to do it yourself. The sense of autonomy in agile environments, dictates that Product Teams decide themselves how to develop their products. This holds true for every product, including platforms. So our Competence Experts need to shift from a ‘you have to run it by me’ attitude to a ‘you will want to run it by me’ attitude. And that’s a huge shift.

Many of the people I know that are part of a Competence Center, a Center of Excellence or similar organisational body are really having a hard time wrapping their heads around this. When explaining to them that they’re now supposed to create a product that people will have to want to use instead of just have to use, they have a hard time to fathom what this entails. In my experience, platform teams are among the teams that are the most urgently in need of intensive coaching on concepts like agile and lean.

Not Platform but Product

These teams are often called Competence Centers, but they are merely Product Teams grouped around a certain business aspect using specific development technology. The classification of ‘Competence Center’ is not warranted and these teams should avoid becoming a platform team and instead focus on obtaining business knowledge. Since they are in fact developing business products. Interestingly enough, these teams are more and more converted into Competence Centers although they are probably the teams that are actually in close contact with the user. Being a specialist in a certain technology, or being a team that uses a specific technology to create value doesn’t make you a Competence Center, and certainly not a Platform Team.

Concluding

The role of the Competence Center in large organisations is diminishing as agile development methods are adopted. The shift from efficiency towards effectiveness is emphasising this even further and CC’s will be obsolete in most if not all cases. Does this mean that all efforts exerted in the past in honing the skills of the experts corralled in these centers were in vain?
Absolutely not. Guilds, Platform Teams and new Product Teams are taking hold and further enhance the agility of the business. Provided organisations are adopting as part of their Agile Transformation strategies also concepts around Autonomy, Facilitating Leadership and User-Centric Design, the future of those that once formed Competence Centers will be bright.

Thanks once again for reading my blog. Please don't be hesitate to Tweet about it, put a link on Facebook or recommend this blog to your network on LinkedIn. Heck, send the link of my blog to all your Whatsapp friends and everybody in your contact-list. But if you really want to show your appreciation, drop a comment with your opinion on the topic, your experiences or anything else that is relevant.

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The 'obsoletion' of the CC in an agile world...

... or 'The incompetence of the CC in an agile world'. This is the first in a two part blog post on Competence Centers.

Summarising

Competence Centers have no place in agile environments. They're a remnant from the past in which IT was considered to be something to reduce costs instead of creating value. In the new world, CC's are incompetent, which means they should be dissolved and the freed brains of the specialists are available to work on other (business) challenges.

They still exist, you see them everywhere, the larger the organisation the more prevalent they are. The CC and I don't mean Carbon Copies or those long lists of recipients in emails that the sender wants to be aware of the message she's delivering. I am talking about Competence Centers.

What is a Competence Center?

Competence Centers, once upon a time, made sense. Not always as clearly as one would think, but with an overzealous tendency of making IT more efficient, centralization of capabilities seemed to make perfect sense. You can find these centers in 'normal' factories as well, specialised areas in the factory that is optimised to do something special. More on the topic on efficiency and effectiveness can be found in this post. But obviously every decent book on Lean Manufacturing would be fine as well. And while you're at it, take a look at the classic 'The Goal' by Eliyahu M. Goldratt.
There's a huge benefit of having Competence Centers, CC's, in organisations where you want to improve IT's efficiency, especially when the aim is to improve cost-efficiency. In other words, when you want to reduce IT costs to the max, you're best of by introducing Competence Centers. Mind that CC's are to reduce cost, not improve production. This is a misconception I see a lot.

Before I start explaining the benefit of having CC's in your organisation. Let me explain what a Competence Center is. Here's what Gartner has to say about it:

competency center

An organizational structure used to coordinate IT skills with an enterprise. Competency centers provide expertise for project or program support, acting both as repositories of knowledge and resource pools for multiple business areas. Skills-based competency centers, the most common type in an information services organization, are used for application development, software language skills, data management, Internet development and network design. Within the enterprise, it is increasingly common to find competency centers (or shared services) for travel, finance and human resources. Repository-based competencies act exclusively as sources of information.

As things with Gartner go, ... they're typically right on target, but so easy to misinterpret. And then there's the problem with dates. Most people that read Gartner reports forget to check the date. Every article Gartner publishes is dated. And as you know, in today's world, a year or two is a lifetime.

Anyhow, Gartner's definition of a CC is spot on for most enterprises. But just to be sure, within the context of this post, a Competence Center is a centralised organisation body in which a specific capability or function is concentrated to be used and reused by as many teams, persons, departments within the organisation.
The benefit of having a CC is obvious. By concentrating an organisation's expertise into a single department, the organisation is in a position to leverage that expertise to the fullest... in terms of efficiency.

Within a traditional organisation this makes perfect sense. IT is enabling the organisation to be as efficient in conducting its business as possible. This can only be achieved when IT itself is extremely efficient. Resources within IT are therefore to be utilised as close as possible to 100%. By introducing CC's, the organisation can achieve this goal. Especially because the work done by the CC is specialised work. By putting all experts in a single department or even a single location, the experts can optimise their processes and standardise their work.

Why Conway is relevant?

This works perfectly in environments where business products are developed in relatively long lasting projects with separate phases for analyses, design, implementation, testing and deployments; Waterfall projects. The CC's work really well because they are required to act for a specific project on preset milestones in which they are asked to deliver one or more of their specific standardised solutions. And they are invoked only once or twice during the project, everything is optimised around the 100% utilisation target.
Scaling is either not necessary or required within limitations. Conway's law is at help here as well. In short, what Conway says is that the social structure of an organisation, the organisational structure, reflects the architecture of the software that is developed/used within the organisation. Look around and you see this holds true for pretty much all organisations.

So, with Conway on our side, we can state that CC's and their economic justification (i.e. resource optimisation) warrant their existence and strengthens their position as well. The important aspect here is that in a stable system, being an organisation that evolves gradually yet constantly, the requirement for a CC is a self fulfilling prophesy. The Competence Center is therefore a necessity by design.
Which should sound pretty scary to you once you think about it. But there's nothing to worry since it makes perfect sense to have these centers in environment where waterfall is applied to do projects. More over, when governing waterfall projects using PRINCE2 or alike methodologies, it becomes even more likely that the best solution is the use of CC's throughout the organisation.

Disrupting the CC

So, where's the incompetence of the Competence Center you're asking yourself. Well, it lies in the fact that recently there have been a number of extremely disruptive developments in how we apply IT in our organisations.

Scrum

For one there is Scrum. I deliberately don't call it agile. Scrum typically revolves around developers being able to discuss what they're developing with their users in (extremely) short timespans. This means that once a developer is working on something and actually believes that something is finished, the user comes into play to verify, or rather validate that view of the developer. Typically and preferably, the developer will start working on the functionality once it's clear that so far everything is perfect, or at least good enough for the user. What's that got to do with the CC? Well, if the CC comes into the equation and between the developer and the user, there's a CC that needs to work its magic... well it will take longer for the developer to hear that user is either happy with or needs some adjustments to the work of the developer. Because the CC is involved several times over the course of product development and at seemingly randomly chosen times.

Cloud

Then there's the Cloud. A little piece in cyberspace where apparently anything goes as long as you have a credit card. Of course this is initially always the case, but very quickly Cloud usage in any organisation matures. The disruptive part of the cloud with regard to CC's is that the business model of the Cloud vendors like Amazon, Google and Microsoft, is to get as many solutions in the Cloud as fast as possible. Which entails two very important aspects. For one, everything is automated or can be automated and as consequently can be expressed in code. And secondly, everything is abstracted to the point where intrinsic complexity of IT solution is removed by wizards and mouse clicks. Where the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft actually make the transition from wizards in a browser to coding in an editor to be almost zero-effort. Point being that the CC can be circumvented easily in Cloud environments, not because it's the Cloud, but because the Cloud is removing the raison d'etre of the CC. It's unique position within the organisation's processes to get things done is not existing in the Cloud.

Continuous Delivery/Deployment

Continuous Delivery/Deployment practices are a third disruptor I want to mention. Here the disruption is caused by the fact that effort is put into reducing the cycle time between idea - product - insights (the build-measure-learn loop from a business perspective) as much as possible. Cycle time reduction is achieved predominantly by automation. CD Pipelines, sets of integrated tools used by teams responsible for getting an idea as a product into the hands of a user and getting feedback from the user are team specific. Addressing the specifics of the product developed and the markets using those products to allow for fine tuning in order to get product/market fit. Together with Lean practices, the Continuous Delivery or even Deployment paradigms build on concepts that help further reduce the cycle time. Which means that there is within a given timeframe more opportunity to go to production. Since the process requires the involvement of the CC, the CC is required more often to act.

What about other disruptors?

Obviously there're a lot more aspects and disruptors that are putting the CC to shame, but the above are the ones I see most often causing a problem with Competence Centers. And the reason why they are so problematic in organisations that rely on Competence Centers is the fact that these are implemented from a mindset that centralisation results in more efficient resource utilisation. Thus resulting in lower cost. And there's your problem, because the CC's are bottlenecks in the process. It's fine when it is possible to plan for their involvement in the process, because one can do some proper resource planning. But when the CC is called to action whenever needed, they're causing delays. The problem is caused by the lack of elasticity, which obviously is needed. And we all know how challenging it is to scale a department up and down. Especially one that was created because of its specialised nature.

Scaling is always a problem

So scaling is a problem and it is needed to be able to support all product developments Just In Time an in such a way that you don't need to plan for their services or make reservations.
The only way to handle this, as you might have guessed is by automating the process steps the CC would perform. Machines are excellent when it comes to scaling. So the CC can only be competent within the agile enterprise when it automates its own activities.
Far fetched? I think not! Think about IT infrastructure teams that are extremely specialised. Provisioning servers, connectivity and storage is not a trivial task. You need specialists to do this, especially when it needs to be done within quality margins. And infrastructure was one of the first areas where automation was used to be able to support the JIT characteristics of agile product developments. Automation and virtualisation resulted in... tada... The Cloud.

Automation has been the culprit for the demise of the infrastructure teams, sort of. Because the automation functionality was given to the product developers, who started provisioning infrastructure from a self-service portal.

The trend is that CC's are becoming bottlenecks in processes. The problem is solved by widening the bottleneck through scaling of the CC by adding resources. Which is costly if at all possible, and automation is used to fix this. Automated processes are fool-proof in many cases, and therefore development teams can access the automated processes all by themselves. The CC is rendered obsolete.

Efficient or Effective?

Is this a problem? Not from an enterprise perspective, because less CC's means less costs. So more (cost) efficient. And on top of that, or even more importantly, the CC's are obsolete because their tasks are automated, therefore more consistent in execution and they can be executed at will. Or if you will, just in time. So more effective as well as more efficient.
From a human resources perspective, there is a challenge. Because the experts in the CC are no longer required since the machine made them obsolete. Or did it? In fact, the specialist made herself obsolete. As an organisation you want to cherish these specialists because they understand how to fix process bottlenecks, often have an engineering mindset and are most likely able to adjust and become a specialist in other areas as well. Or even more desirable, they become platform engineers that will maintain and further develop the platform that was once maintained by the CC. Not in a manner of keeping the lights on but further developing the platform. Just like the infrastructure engineers created the Cloud platform and continuously develop it. Not as a Competence Center, but as a platform team.

Hence, Competence Centers are incompetent in agile environments, but that's an opportunity as it means that perfectly automatable functions no longer keep the engineers and specialist busy with repetitive tasks and allows them to work on not automatable functions we tend to call platforms.

Thanks once again for reading my blog. Please don't be hesitate to Tweet about it, put a link on Facebook or recommend this blog to your network on LinkedIn. Heck, send the link of my blog to all your Whatsapp friends and everybody in your contact-list. But if you really want to show your appreciation, drop a comment with your opinion on the topic, your experiences or anything else that is relevant.

Please subscribe to my blog to show your support.

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Where's the Agile Architect hiding?

Nowadays everybody and their mother is turning, transforming into agile beings. But where is the Agile Architect? In October of 2017 I did a presentation at ASAS2017 about the Agile Architect. Ever since I have been contacted about the presentation and specifically about what the architect's role is in agile organisations. Because of this, I think it is time to shed some light on this. Thus... Find out in this post.

Summarising

The Agile Architect is this Product Architect that is taking care of the organisation's software product landscape and maintaining its integrity. The Product Architect ensures that based on the input of the Business Architect and the Product Owner the product landscape is sound, adaptable and delivers overall architectural agility.

The difference between doing agile and being agile

The Agile Architect is a rare beast in today's agile organisations. But before I go down this rabbit hole I need to emphasise the fact that I am talking here about organisations that are agile and not those that are doing agile.
The main difference is that when you do agile, you're living by the book, like a religious zealot. You follow the rules, have your rituals and so on. It typically means that you're organised according to the school of SCRUM. Small teams of max 9 individuals, one Scrum Master, a Product Owner. working in Sprints that take typically two weeks, have your daily stand-ups, your retro's and demo's and a backlog of user stories and epics. In contrast, when you are agile, you're taking the lead from the agile manifesto, do the hard things as often as possible, prioritise your activities according to value, have a build-measure-learn loop in place and determine your next actions based on feedback from your users. This is the short version... Obviously.

Independence and autonomy are prerequisite for Agile Architecture

So having established this, I can continue on the topic of the agile architect. Well, just before I venture into that direction, let me explain that in an agile organisation, you also find a strong longing for independence and autonomy. Mind that it is not anarchy that is sought after. The challenge here is that different teams want to move with different speeds. Often this is called bi-modal or multi-modal (you can read about this for example in my post "Let me spell out why Bimodal IT doesn't work"). It doesn't matter how you want to call it, what it boils down to is that different teams work on different products and the organisation's market dictates that each product needs to adopt to changed circumstances in a timely manner, where 'timely' has different meanings for different products. It's extremely logical and also extremely unsexy. These different requirements regarding development speeds requires independence between products and therefore teams. Obviously, whenever there is a dependence, the speeds are linked and in fact agility is lost. Something I'll cover in another post some time soon.
So independence is required here. Autonomy is also important, because if a team cannot decide by itself how to solve problems, how to implement features, how to enable proper operational management, and instead have this dictated by a third party. There is a dependency with a bottleneck and hence agility is at risk. Look for the upcoming post "The Incompetence of the CC..." that will feel enlightening in case you don't understand this right now. But again, it is in fact quite logical how this all works.

So teams should be able to act independently of each other and should have a high level of autonomy, in fact the organisation should strive for the highest level of independence and autonomy that is possible within the context of that organisation. Note the subtlety of the last part of that sentence; that is possible within the context of that organisation. I am explicitly not saying that all control should be dropped and no governance should be implemented.

With the teams being autonomous and independent, the question about the role of the architect arises. Typically the first question I get is whether the architect should be part of the Product Team or not. And my answer is at all times that the architect is not part of the Product Team, where the Product Team is the team that develops and supports a (business) product. Just like the Product Owner is not part of the team, the Product Architect (that's what I call the architect) is not part of the team. This doesn't mean that the architecture of the software is to be neglected, what I am saying is that the team itself is responsible for the application architecture, referring to the internal structure of the software. There are typically a lot of important impromptu decisions to be made during the development of the software where the right decision is determined by the specific context in which the decision is key. The team knows best. That is not to say that anything goes. I'll get to what I mean by this in a second.

The Product Architect is not so much responsible for the software architecture, but for the positioning of the product in the organisation's landscape.The Product Architect is accountable for the integrity of this landscape. The meaning of this is best described through a use-case.
[Read this post on the importance of accountability and responsibility.]

Agile Architecting explained

Consider an organisation's product landscape to consist of several business domains, each consisting of several business products. A business product is a product that is delivered to a user, often a customer of some sorts. The customer typically accesses the business product through an interface. This could be a specialised App, a webpage or maybe a customer-success-agent. This is sometimes referred to as the business front-end, or the customer interface. What is important here is that the customer is not interacting with a piece of software perse, but instead could be interfacing with another human being. Demonstrating that a business product can consist of man and machine. In addition to this, business products can be related to each other. The final step of using one can lead to using another product. There can be a sequence, just like when you go to the movies. You buy a ticket, you get some drinks and snacks at the concession stand and then see the movie. These are three different business products and clearly the buying a ticket and watching a movie are closely related. But independent since the person buying the ticket doesn't have to be the person watching the movie. Think about gift-tickets.
So you see there are several (related) business products. How they relate to each other is part of the responsibilities of the Business Architect(s), sometimes called Business Domain Architect or just Domain Architect. It is the Business Architects that will typically decide to which domain a business product belongs. Buying things could be the Sales domain and watching a movie in the Media domain, or buying the ticket and watching the movie can belong the the Movie domain and the drinks and snacks in the Concession Sales domain. It's arbitrary but needs to be decided upon, this is what the Business Architect does.
Once it is decided to which domain a (new) business product belongs, it is the (new) Product Owner that determines how the business product is taking shape. Think about the MVP. Often the MVP is a first incarnation of a product, but it can be in fact be a completely different product that is used to verify that there is in fact a need, a requirement, for the new product. An MVP could be a simple teaser webpage announcing the new product or poster with a box attached that potential customers can put a card in saying how excited they are to get hold of the new product.
When the Product Owner ties the knot that software is to be developed, something typically decided after consulting the Business Architect and the Product Architect(s) for the products in a business domain, it is the Product Architect that comes into play. This is where the Product Architect is taking the task to maintain the landscape's integrity. First of all, the Product Architect will have to determine whether or not a new product is to be developed or an existing product is to be enhanced or adapted. In case of a new product development, it has to be determined what the best technology is to do this. Here it is important for the Product Architect to understand the product. The Product Owner is a significant source of knowledge and information here. Who'll be the user of the product and how will the user access the product? What are the security requirements and what about compliance aspects? Transactional integrity is important as well. Also the intended life span of the product is important. And obviously the product's relations and integrations with other products is key and for this the Business Architect needs to be consulted. Obviously all architectural principles are taken into account and the Product Architect will define what principles are such that specific practices are to be maintained. Consider a product that does financial transactions, that could mean that specific frameworks and products need to be used for the implementation. Or the fact that the product is going to be used by students after marketing campaigns, resulting in a deployment in Amazon AWS instead of the organisation's own data centres.
The Product Architect, in response to the Product Owner's requirements for the product, will also be responsible for example to define an API that is published as part of the product offering.

Product Architect vs Product Team

By deciding all this, the Product Architect is to some extent dictating the products architecture, and still it is the Product Team that is responsible for the software architecture and not the Product Architect. So how does this work? Remember I promised earlier in this post that I would elaborate on this.
It is actually very simple and all based on the role of Architecture Principles. The organisation will have its organisation wide Architecture Principles, principles that are to be followed at all times. Possibly depending on context, though. I always like to mention that KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is the prime-directive of everybody. By stating so, everybody introducing complexity is violating this principle. As a consequence, the principle enforces the policy to deliver always the minimum that is required, hence helps implementing a LEAN mindset.
Apart from principles that are organisation wide and principles that are applied in a specific context, emphasising that the context needs to be specific, a Product Architect can also define so called 'local architecture principles' that are local to the teams within the circle of influence of the Product Architect. Think about these as local extensions on the existing principles. Maybe because the domain is subject to some specific regulatory context or maybe because the domain is specific for a specific market.
The Product Teams are always to abide by these principles. So although they have autonomy on how to do things, they need to stay within the framework of these principles. They can't just decide to make an overly complex solution, because that would violate KISS.
In addition, the Product Architect can also limit the acceptable answers to implementation questions. For example the Product Architect can state as a principle that all API's are based on Open Web Standards, but in addition decide that all API's that are exposed on the internet are to be based on REST/JSON and API's that are with business partners to be based on WS-*.

Consequential impact

All the above decisions also lead to other decisions. A decision for a specific deployment platform may mean that only certain teams are capable of doing the development. Or deciding that the product needs an API as well as a web-UI may result in the situation that two teams will work on the product, one on the product with the API and the other working on the web-UI based on the API.
Also, envision the situation where timelines are not really up to the needs of the Product Owner, it is then for the Product Owner and the Product Architect to determine the architectural shortcuts to be taken. Using different technologies to leverage the availability of another team for example.

Concluding

As you can see, the Product Architect's role is very challenging, just like the role of Product Owner. But although it is very challenging, it is also very much scoped towards the external aspects of the products. The scope is about the product in its surroundings. Think about the layout of a street with houses instead of the layout of the individual houses. Of course, the type of house, or rather building is a Product Architect's call. Villa's, brown stones or apartments is up to the Product Architect, not the amount of bathrooms, the type of tiles or the kind of sofa's. That's up to the Product Team in response to what the Product Owner can turn into value.

The Agile Architect is this Product Architect that is taking care of the organisation's software product landscape and maintaining its integrity. The Product Architect ensures that based on the input of the Business Architect and the Product Owner the product landscape is sound, adaptable and delivers overall architectural agility.

Thanks once again for reading my blog. Please don't be reluctant to Tweet about it, put a link on Facebook or recommend this blog to your network on LinkedIn. Heck, send the link of my blog to all your Whatsapp friends and everybody in your contact-list. But if you really want to show your appreciation, drop a comment with your opinion on the topic, your experiences or anything else that is relevant.

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The Arc-E-Tect predictions for 2017 - In hindsight [2/2]

Last year, like every year, I did some predictions on what would be in and what would be out in 2017. But unlike other years, last year I actually posted those predictions on the internet.
Before I start with my predictions for 2018, I will go back to my predictions for 2017 and see how things turned out.
This is part two, and part one you can find here.

#6: KVI in, KPI out

"Forget about performance. Performance, in the end, means nothing when it comes to an organisation’s bottomline. What matters is value. However you want to cut it, unless value is created, it’s not worth the effort. And by value being created I mean that the difference between cost and benefit increases."

First prediction that I am looking at in this post is a bust. Although more and more teams and organisations are transforming into agile adopters, the value driven aspects of agility is still undervalued by most. I hardly come across organisations, departments or even just teams where success is measured in terms of realised value. Vanity metrics are pretty much still the norm. It's a shame because it also means that the promise of applying agile concepts are still a long way from being realised.

#7: Products in, Projects out

"It shouldn't surprise you, but I'm not a big proponent of projects and instead love to see it when organisations switch to a product focused approach. But in 2017 it will turn out that I'm not the only one."

This is happening big time in a lot of environments I've been in. The main reason why organisations transition from a project perspective towards a product perspective is because of CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery). With reduced cycle times as a result of automation of the software delivery process, it is almost impossible to not release a product early and keep on working on it. Hence, delivery to production does not result in the end of a team.
My main concern in these situations is the lack of a Product Owner who has mandate over scope. The Project Manager typically does not have that mandate. It is the next step.

#8: Heterogeneous in, Homogeneous out

"In 2017 we’ll truly face the uprising of new and more technologies, concepts, architectures, models, etc. And in order to be able to manage this we will finally understand that we need to embrace the fact that our environments consist of a multitude of everything. In many smaller organisations that are at the forefront of technology and that are working in agile environment it is a given, but now that large organisations have also set out to adopt the ‘Spotify’ concept and thus teams have a huge amount of autonomy, polyglot is key."

Yes! Most organisations have dropped their need for huge standardisation efforts. Instead I see that architecture principles are becoming highly popular. With that and the gradual move towards autonomous teams I do see a shift in mindset where homogeneous environments is no longer considered the answer to all IT problems. This is also a mindset shift from efficient towards effective.

#9: Activities in, Roles out

"The thing is, we’re moving, as an industry, in the direction where we want be able to get feedback as early in the process as possible, which means that every person concerned with creating and delivering a products will be involved in everything needed to create that product and ensure that it works as intended and more importantly as needed. In this setup, everybody is what we in 2016 called a full-stack developer."

In 2017 this didn't happen. The T-Shaped employee and the Full-stack developer are found in small organisations. Large enterprises still have a culture based on decades of functional hierarchies. Contracts are still based on roles where T-Shaped and Full-stack have yet to find their spot. Unless agile transformations are no longer considered to be merely an IT and even just a software development thing, it will become very hard to get into cultures where teams are considered to be the atomic entity in product development and instead of roles and responsibilities, tasked are performed as activities.

#10: Agile in, Waterfall uhm... also in

"Well, agile is finally in and is going to replace waterfall projects in those organisations where there is an active movement towards agile. Which nowadays are the majority of enterprises. These organisations are heavily invested in dropping the traditional practices and adopting new, more business value oriented practices."

In 2017 I saw more and more organisations realising that the typical waterfall projects can actually be done in agile ways. This notion is actually causing the existence of waterfall to be questioned. Do we still need waterfall? No, not at all. But we still need large projects. In 2017 I saw a realisation by many managers as well as architects that large project and waterfall are not different words for the same behemoth, instead there is no a clear tendency to actually do large projects by applying agile practices and waterfall seems to be relegated to only tiny projects. Ironic, but pretty awesome.

This was part two of a two part on a quick glance on my predictions of 2017. Yesterday, I have posted part one of the series and see about how the first 5 predictions turned out. Next week will be about my predictions for 2018.

I hope you enjoyed this post. Thanks once again for reading my blog. Please don't be reluctant to Tweet about it, put a link on Facebook or recommend this blog to your network on LinkedIn. Heck, send the link of my blog to all your Whatsapp friends and everybody in your contact-list. But if you really want to show your appreciation, drop a comment with your opinion on the topic, your experiences or anything else that is relevant.

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The Arc-E-Tect predictions for 2017 - In hindsight [1/2]

Last year, like every year, I did some predictions on what would be in and what would be out in 2017. But unlike other years, last year I actually posted those predictions on the internet.
Before I start with my predictions for 2018, I will go back to my predictions for 2017 and see how things turned out.

#1: Microservice in, SOA out

"In 2017 people will start looking at Microservices as something that is useful and way better to have in your architecture than services. So a Microservices Architecture will replace Service Oriented Architectures in 2017."

With a massive transition towards agile practices and organisations embracing scaled agile frameworks, it has been inevitable, the Microservice Architecture (MSA) has been broadly embraced. Or has it?

In 2017 I've seen that those organisations that require true agile concepts in practice in order to be(come) sustainable also embraced MSA as the architecture of choice. The change in mindset that is required for MSA to thrive in an IT landscape and an organisation itself for that matter turns out to be more encompassing than mostly thought. I've seen it fail in those organisations that merely do agile, and succeed in those situations that are agile. Yes, MSA and Agile are going hand in hand.

#2: API's in, Webservices out

"Okay, in 2017 we'll feel ashamed when we talk about web-services and SOA. Instead we'll talk about API's. This is closely related to my first prediction on Microservices, which you can read here."

Here I can be short: There's hardly any talk about web-services anymore. It's all about API's nowadays and that has been the case for the better part of 2017. Over the course of 2017 the notion of API's also shifted from merely glorified web-services towards true business services.

#3: Application Architecture in, Application Model out

"Yes, in 2016 I've been confronted with application models. Again and again I have been slapped with models of applications and yes, I've been on the other end of the slapin' stick as well. Shoving application models into other people's faces. Stuffing it down their throats, making them, no forcing them to understand."

Unfortunately this prediction didn't come true at all. Although it depends on how you look at it. In 2017 I've been in more discussions than before about Application Architectures, although in most cases people were actually talking about models. I guess the terminology is out of vogue, but a lot of architects still have a hard time to use the correct terminology. Still, to me the Application Model isn't out and the Application Architecture isn't in. Just yet. Probably with a more widespread adoption of MSA, we're bound to ditch the model and embrace the architecture.

#4: Internet in, Intranet out

"So the internet will be in, and no longer will we consider the intranet as the context in which our software is running. Talk with any cyber security firm and they will tell you that security has become a real issue since computers got connected. Networks are the root of all evil when it comes to viruses and the likes. The larger the networks, the bigger the problems. And with heterogeneity the number of threats only grew, probably exponentially."

This so turned out to be a correct prediction, and like I envisioned, one of the main drivers has been security. And the lack of it, in many cases.

In most environments I've been working in and with over the course of 2017 there was a real notion that no longer was it affordable to not consider security on an application level and assume that applications could be accessed from the internet. Even when that wasn't supposed to happen. Finally we know that assuming the network to be secure is an assumption that really does make an ass of u and me (assume -> ass-u-me)

The good if not best aspect of this is a security-by-design mindset in most if not all people involved in product development.

#5: DevOps in, Scrum out

"I can be very short about this. Business has finally come to understand that IT is not something that enables them to deliver new products to their customers but instead IT is what they deliver to their customers. IT has become a product, and therefore an immediate business concern."

In 2017 it turned out to be not that short, unfortunately. What I've seen happening is that unless agility is a true business concern, a matter of business sustainability, DevOps is not something organisations want to embrace. Although this is primarily a matter of large enterprises, those with seemingly enough money in the bank to linger a while longer before feeling the need of being able to wart of the threads of start-ups and their agility.

This was part one of a two part on a quick glance on my predictions of 2017. In the next couple of days, possibly tomorrow, I will post part two of the series and see about how the remaining 5 predictions turned out. Next week will be about my predictions for 2018.

I hope you enjoyed this post. Thanks once again for reading my blog. Please don't be reluctant to Tweet about it, put a link on Facebook or recommend this blog to your network on LinkedIn. Heck, send the link of my blog to all your Whatsapp friends and everybody in your contact-list. But if you really want to show your appreciation, drop a comment with your opinion on the topic, your experiences or anything else that is relevant.

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What makes an ideal agile team?

Summarising

In many occasions I am being asked by clients to share my thoughts on how they are (planning to) form their Scrum teams. My recurring comments always are to have the team as small as possible, stable and consisting of full-time individuals, maxing out at 9 persons. Have one or more coaches linked to the teams and make sure that there is a mandated Product Owner.
Make sure that relationships are based on trust and ensure that accountability and responsibility are two aspects addressed organisationally with full support of upper management.

The other day I was asked by a manager of one of my clients to comment on a proposal of one of his vendors. A key vendor that has been under delivering since a very long time, but still considered to be a strategic partner in most of my client's business. The vendor is currently experimenting with a different way of addressing its customers by better aligning its services to the needs of its customers. The vendor is proposing to setup a cross-functional team that will be tasked to deliver relevant products in short cycles.

My client is a little sceptical but willing to give the vendor the benefit of the doubt. As such he's agreeing to become one of the first customers to work according to the new proposed process and is now asking me to see what to look for in the proposal. Being the first customer and thus investing time and effort in amending the current mode of operations with this vendor, there's some head room to 'ask' for specific adjustments to the proposal.

The vendor is going to deliver new products and services in a variety of categories to my client and is proposing to setup a Scrum team. My client now wants to know if there are specific aspects of this team that need to be addressed. Also the role of my client with regard to this team is a point of interest in the negotiations. And obviously the delivery of products and services to my client.

Basically the question is: How should my vendor organise its team in order to better meet our requirements? The answer is reasonably straight forward.

In principle you want to keep a Scrum team as small as possible, that is actually a basic principle. The maximum size for a well-functioning team is 9 people. This has already been discovered by the ancient Romans, no kidding.

I would like to argue to start with 6 or 7 people. Rather 6 than 7 by the way. The reason for this is that otherwise you will get specialisations within the team that come to lie with one person, that will immediately become the SPOC / F, who can not get sick or go on holiday.
The strength of a well-collaborating team lies mainly in the knowledge spread throughout the team as well as complementing personalities of the team. This allows members to challenge, supplement and assist each other. It is a common mistake to see what kind of techniques and technologies you want to use and to find the experts for that. It is a Team and not a Group we're trying to forge. Understand the difference, it's important.

I find the use of FTEs in resource planning of Scrum teams confusing and dangerous. I've seen this plenty of time and it never resulted in anything good. One FTE can be filled in by 1 or more people, and that is what you want to prevent. You want the team to be stable, not only within a sprint but also over sprints. Almost at any cost. Again, I'm not talking about a group but about a Team. And, they must all have an engineering mindset. People who dislike doing things themselves and want to automate everything by definition.

Recently I was asked on the subject within the context of an initiative to start treating an operating environment as a platform, which was going to be treated like a product. With a Product Owner at the helm. And a group of my client's experts was assembled to form the 'Scrum team'. I was asked to provide my thoughts on this setup.

We're talking about server provisioning, networking, identity and access management, firewalls, certificates etc. This team is also going to be responsible for operating the platform they're developing. My initial thought is to have therefore functional expertise (provisioning, networking, identity management, loadbalancer, firewalls) and an engineering mindset (automating, monitoring, everything as code), if possible either a senior in one or more functional areas and medior in engineer and vice versa. Depending on the team composition, there may also be a medior / medior combination when there's enough seniority in the overal team. Attitude is more important than knowledge in my opinion. I would therefore always prefer someone who wants to automate, will always test and always asks for insight into production.

I do not see why one would need a full-time Scrum Master, that's probably overkill. Having said that, it seems wise to let the team choose their Scrum Master from the team itself. And with experienced teams that have been working together for a considerable time this is likely a viable option. But when you're just starting with Scrum in your organisation or when the team is just starting with Scrum and Agile concepts, I always prefer a Scrum Master from outside the team. Since the Scrum Master is the team's conscience, and at times will have to use strong words to get focus back on the team's goals and principles... it will be challenging for a Scrum Master from within the team.
Add a coach for roughly the first 6 sprints to coach the Scrum Master, even though the Scrum Master might be experienced, it is still good to have a coach. The team chooses the Scrum Master because it will ensure that it's their choice, a choice supported by the team. You want good chemistry between team and conscience.
The role of the Scrum Master is all about addressing people to the standards and values ​​of the team, but also facilitating them in doing their work. I have seen in various situations that it can work when the Scrum Master is also facilitating in another supportive role, e.g. as Tool integrator in Continuous Deployment environments. I'm not a proponent of this though.

I told the client that I was missing the Product Owner (PO) in his approach. The PO is relevant because the PO determines what the team is going to work on. That would be the person who talks to the customers about what is needed, etc. And to the users about what was delivered. Therefore the PO is accountable for what the team will deliver. The team is responsible for what it creates, the PO is accountable. These are the two most important aspects.

Keep in mind that responsibility can be delegated and shared, accountability cannot be delegated nor shared. So a delegated PO doesn't exist, as it would mean delegated accountability.

So a stable team and a PO (outside the team) defining the team's priorities. No one else but the PO is mandated (i.e. empowered) to determine what the team is working on, because the PO defines the priorities of the products and features to be developed. The team plans the work. So there has to be, by definition, a lot of trust between the PO and the Team, because the PO must be able to rely on the team's commitment to what they are going to do in a sprint. Here comes the Scrum Master in the picture again. Because the Scrum Master has to make sure that the team does not overcommit.

Here's an interesting aspect, the trust aspect. An aspect I will address in a future post, where I will cover more on metrics and KPI's and the trouble of the user story in this regard.

In my opinion, the role of customers should be not only one of the customer, but also one of the user. This will allow a user-centric approach on developing the product, and at the same time be very customer aware.

You should look for a future post on stakeholder management and agile processes to get some more insights on this topic.

I told in another case with another client of mine that it makes perfect sense to start treating their Scrum teams as internal startups. Basically consider the PO of these teams as the CEO of the startup and the management team would be the Venture Capitalists. By doing so, there's ample opportunity to experiment and evolve into a value driven minded organisation.
In this particular case I suggested to see if it would be feasible to go along these same lines.

The PO will need to determine what an MVP would be. Something small delivered in short increments, so to quickly find out if something is usable. Start cultivating a mindset where 'Done' means 'In use at a customer!' (Done = Live).
Agile means being able to deal with change in a timely manner. So here comes the point of view that the PO is a person who has a strong personality and is met with a lot of respect. Somebody that knows what the product should look like, with a product vision. And the PO will have to be mandated/empowered. It should never be the case that the customer can circumvent the PO to get things prioritised. This is for internal and external customers. And managers.

Again, I told my client to get a coach involved here as well. Even if it is an experienced PO, it is important to be coached. In the beginning intensive, but perhaps later (even after 6 sprints) it may be a bit less. It might be an opportunity to invest in an agile-coach, who will take care of all the coaching work (team, Scrum Master and PO).
Just like the PO is mandated to define what is and what is nog going to be in the product, the Team and the PO should be granted autonomy, independence and self-reliance. The PO is positioned external to the Team and in case of scaling up the team to two teams I would like to argue that both teams get the same PO.

In this particular setting, one could even consider starting with three small teams of 3 to 4 people who all work on their own part within the platform, three products if you will. A team for provisioning servers, one that works on network and connectivity (including DNS, firewalls, loadbalancers) and a team that focuses on IAM Automation (Directory services for example) and certificates. Combine these teams with a single Scrum Master and a PO with three Teams. Obviously an Agile coach for the whole bunch.

So, concluding: A maximum of 9 individuals, all full-time, in the Team. One of which will assume  the role of Scrum Master. Alternatively, form 3 teams of 3 to 4 full-time individuals with an overarching Scrum Master. In addition, a PO with knowledge of the subject matter and full mandate and an agile-coach.

Thanks once again for reading my blog. Please don't be reluctant to Tweet about it, put a link on Facebook or recommend this blog to your network on LinkedIn. Heck, send the link of my blog to all your Whatsapp friends and everybody in your contact-list. But if you really want to show your appreciation, drop a comment with your opinion on the topic, your experiences or anything else that is relevant.

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Product Owner and Architect, agile tag-team

Picture yourself in an environment where agile practices are adopted as the standard way of developing solutions. Now if you're really ambitious, you're picturing yourself in an environment where there are no projects, only products. Consider yourself to be part of a team working on a product, a product team. The team is comprised of all the necessary expertises to create the product it's developing. The team you're part of is responsible for the product, cradle to grave.
But wait a minute, are you really part of the team? Or are you external to the team, but do consider yourself heavily involved with the team? You might be the Product Owner or an architect.

Is the PO not part of the team? Maybe, maybe not. It's not that important actually. And what about the architect? Is the architect not part of the team? Well, the architect, I would think and this is just my very humble opinion, is not part of the team. The architect is concerned with the team, but not this team, but all the teams that are in the architect's domain. The architect is there to ensure that the products form a cohesive landscape that, by synergy, creates the most value for the organisation as is thinkable. Back to the PO. The PO might own many products in a portfolio...

Your picture. Did you picture yourself in this organisation as part of the team, of a team, or as somebody outside the team? It doesn't really matter too much. Really.

The interesting part of such an organisation, be it a for-profit or a not-for-profit or even something governmental, such an organisation is catering for its business, for the users of its products. And the products are there to generate value, pure and simple, life's better with every new version of the products the organisation releases. The product teams are there to work on these products, to make sure that the users are actually able to use these products and once they have those products at their disposal, they can continue to use them.

Other than in more traditional organisations where products are developed in projects, where there is a project organisation and a operations department to keep the solutions running. In these organisations teams, the project teams, are only concerned with getting the products out. And in many organisations it doesn't even goes as far as that and the project teams are primarily concerned with ensuring the products are accepted by the operations department. This is how these organisations work, and this is how teams operate. That's not to say that the individual members of the teams are not concerned about the quality of what they create or whether or not users actually like their products and use them. And that's not to say that the people working operations department are not concerned with the development of the software and that the quality is great etc. Organisationally, there's a divide and more importantly there's no one single entity that is responsible cradle to grave for the products.

What about this tag-team, this agile tag-team?

The effectiveness of the PO-Architect team, this tag-team, is the greatest in this product oriented organisation. The more 'agile' is considered a business trait instead of just an IT trait or even solely a software development trait, the bigger the impact the tag-team can and will have on the bottomline of the organisation, in a positive way.

Here's why. The PO, when peeled like an onion is at the core only caring about creating business value. And the PO has two currencies that he can use to invest in order to create even more value. For one there's the crude oil of product development: €'s. Here we have the simple fact that the the business needs to be able to earn more money with the PO's products than the PO had to invest in creating the products. It's a simple matter of cost/benefit and ROI. The less the PO needs to spend, the more the business makes and the shorter the time for the business to earn back the investment the better.
But there's also the second currency, which is time. Time taking to create the product, or a new value creating feature of an existing product. Time has no ROI. You have to invest time, knowing you'll never get it back. You might save time with your product, but the time you invest, you can only invest once. This is important because you want to invest as little of that time in something that generates the most value. Think about this for a second... what it means is that you want to create a new product (or feature) that will generate the maximum value in a minimum timeframe. The crude oil, your €'s are secondary to this, as a PO, because you have a product team available that you need to pay for anyway. Remember, you're working in a product oriented organisation not a project oriented organisation. Your teams are pre-funded! This is also important to note.

So the priority of the PO should be generating as much business value as possible. Therefore the PO needs to prioritise the various products and their features such that the most value creating features are worked on by the product team first. And this is extremely tough for the PO, especially when the PO is not a business person because the PO needs to know what's good for the gander as that is good for the goose.
And in many cases the PO will need to experiment in order to find out whether or not a feature is really needed. Whether it is really going to be used. Whether the form it will be delivered in is the most optimal form. Experiments cost time as well, so the balance between experimenting and applying is critical.

This is where the architect comes in. Without the architect the PO is lost, or at least the PO is susceptible to overspending. First of all, the architect's view is more than just a product and is therefore prone know about solutions to partial problems available elsewhere in the organisation. And leverage them. The architect is the right person to lay the foundation for future features. In part by ensuring that there is a generic (application) infrastructure that can be leveraged throughout the lifecycle of the product. When the PO has the insight to define a product roadmap or a business direction for the product(s) to evolve in, and shares this with the architect. The architect will be even better equipped to pro-actively define the foundations of the products, where a little investment upfront pays itself back at a later stage. See the parallels with the PO, the architect is there to understand where and how best to invest product development time to save more product development time at a later stage.
But there's more, obviously. The architect, and this is the 'secondly' belonging to the 'first of all' from above, is best equipped to define where what corners can be cut for most impact and what experiments to run in order to get the most out of new or specific capabilities. The architect will be the single one person that understands how to scale the organisation's technologies. How to move from a simple, crude yet effective archaic technology to a more complex, elegant and sophisticated version and when to do so. The architect therefore can and will save the most valuable currency of the PO, feature development time, at every step of the way.

Remember that PO and business value creation? Value should be created as quickly as possible, so short development times are important. As much as possible value should be created, so the most desired product features with the biggest impact on the bottomline should be worked on by the team. But which are these features? Well the architect doesn't know these answers, but is perfectly suited to limit the amount of time it takes to either develop a feature or to find out what feature should be developed by devising an experiment. The PO still needs to run the experiment though.

Ah, here comes the hardest part of the post. How to set the right priorities? Which is a question the PO will need to answer. The common way to do this, the wrong way indeed, is to work on the simplest feature to develop. Or the one that can be delivered the fastest. Often these are the same features by the way. This will only result in the PO and the team to feel really good about themselves because they added many features to the product. Something that will in most cases be far from adding the most business value to the product.

Again the architect is a great team member for the PO in this as architecture is not about simple to develop features or quickly realisable solutions. Architecture is about ensuring durability, sustainability. It's about creating a playing field in which complex solutions can be developed quickly, because the groundwork has been done already and therefore a solid foundation is present.

The challenge is with the PO still as business value should be the key to the priority of the feature backlog. So with every feature the PO will need to define how much value will be created, preferably in terms of what will be changed, and what will be the benefit of the change. From a user's perspective, always from a user's perspective. The PO will also need to establish a baseline for each feature he's planning to invest development time in. This is for the simple reason that there's no way to determine whether or not you've improved life as you know it, without knowing what life is before you started your improvements. And consequently, the PO will need to start gathering the right metrics in order to know those improvements. Defining the reason why you want to change something, i.e. defining what the benefits will be, will more or less define what metrics will show progress and therefore what needs to be done to establish a baseline.
Leaves the PO with defining the top priority of all the features that need working on. And this is encoded in the metric used to measured progress and the reason for the change to be developed. From these a projected generated business value can be established.
And this is where the architect can shine again. Not with this little piece of math, but with the part about metrics and measurements. The architect will be the instigator of the existence of a set of architecture principles that allow for metrics and measurements. Principles that lead to the existence of comprehensive measurements, to profound standardisation of those aspects that need no specialisations, to extreme automation of setting up environments. This can be left with the product team, but when there are more than one team, there will be a need and at the least a benefit, of coherence across teams, which is where the architect is acting.

Concluding, the PO and the Architect make a wonderful team that jointly work on the best prioritisation of the feature backlog for the products of the PO. By doing so, they'll minimise the required investments in feature development time for the product team to develop a feature, all the while maximising the created business value. And as icing on the cake, they are in the process ensuring that the hypothesised improvements are validated. You want a cherry on top? With this awesome tag-team you have a perfect opportunity to define a ubiquitous language which is business domain specific and spoken across the whole of the organisation.


Thanks once again for reading my blog. Please don't be reluctant to Tweet about it, put a link on Facebook or recommend this blog to your network on LinkedIn. Heck, send the link of my blog to all your Whatsapp friends and everybody in your contactlist. But if you really want to show your appreciation, drop a comment with your opinion on the topic, your experiences or anything else that is relevant.

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The Arc-E-Tect's Predictions for 2017 - DevOps and Scrum [5/10]

The Arc-E-Tect's Prediction on DevOps and Scrum

It's 2017, meaning 2016 is a done deal, and most of my predictions for 2016 I made about a year ago and never got around documenting in any form have proven to be absolutely bogus. Which leads me to come up with my predictions for 2017 and properly document them. So continue your effort reading this post and hopefully you'll enjoy reading them. Unfortunately we'll have to wait for about a year to find out to what extent I got it all right, but for now, ...DevOps

Why DevOps? Because finally IT is considered a money maker instead of a business enabler. And it's about time.

DevOps in, Scrum out

I can be very short about this. Business has finally come to understand that IT is not something that enables them to deliver new products to their customers but instead IT is what they deliver to their customers. IT has become a product, and therefore an immediate business concern.

Gone will be the days that there is a clear separation between business teams and IT departments.

But before we get there, we need to get rid of the silos between development and operations. Ever shorter release cycles will ensure that everybody will understand that the developer is the operator in order to sustain short feedback cycles.
Because of the short release cycles, it will be possible to 'tune' software that is already in production. Tweaking it until it is as good as needed. Less time is spend on assumed correctness and more time on proven awesomeness. This can only be done by removing all unnecessary links between the consumer and the producer, i.e. the user and the developer.

The business will be requiring that less time evaporates between explaining a new feature and starting to get revenue from that feature. A shift from 'potentially shippable' to 'in the hands of the user' as the definition of done, will mean that we stop thinking about how to create great software that is needed and usable and start thinking about how to get somebody actually using that software.

A 'Product mindset' is a prerequisite for this shift, and abandoning a 'Project mindset' comes with it. I blogged about the consequences of this here. And in 2017 we will start seeing this happening all over the place.


Thanks once again for reading my blog. Please don't be reluctant to Tweet about it, put a link on Facebook or recommend this blog to your network on LinkedIn. Heck, send the link to my blog to all your Whatsapp friends and everybody in your contactlist.But if you really want to show your appreciation, drop a comment with your opinion on the topic, your experiences or anything else that is relevant.

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