Due to their centralized nature, Shared Service teams have special considerations and needs that Agile coaches should be aware of. This article discusses four focus areas for when coaching Shared Services.
Shared Services teams are typically inundated with a large amount of requests. It is not uncommon to see the service demand much higher than the available capacity of the team. To make matters worse, Shared Service dependencies are often blamed for a product development team’s or a release train’s lack of continuous flow.
One thing I don’t like about the current Agile frameworks is that they say very little about Shared Services. For example, SAFe offers only a few paragraphs. It seems to relegate Shared Services onto the spanning palette, to be applied “if needed”. Considering the huge importance of managing product development that will in most cases rely greatly on some level of Shared Services, this lack of detailed guidance seems surprising.
To help fill the gap, this article discusses four focus areas for coaching Shared Services teams:
- Requirements Intake
- Organizing the Work
- Team Synchronization
- Continuous Improvement
The guidance here is based on several years of experience coaching Shared Services organizations.
1. Requirements Intake
Many Shared Services teams allow multiple paths for requirements input – this can be inefficient and confusing.
As coaches, we should coach our Shared Services organization and teams to have a single input channel for requirements. Meet with the team and explore the best one single intake channel. Then encourage the team to make the hard decision to communicate this decision to their customers, and switch over to that single intake process as quickly as possible. Don’t forget to update the team-level working agreements to state that all requirements must come through the agreed-upon input channel.
Additionally, coaches should encourage the Shared Service teams to perform a decent level of requirements analysis up-front when the requirement comes in. Just enough to be able to plan reasonably well and avoid “blow ups” once the work has begun. This means that a small level of capacity (5 – 10%) should be allocated for this all-important ongoing activity. Coach the team to find the healthy balance.
Sometimes just improving the requirements intake process can make a tremendous impact on a Shared Services team!
2. Organizing the Work
Working within a Shared Services team can be challenging. Incoming work requests typically outstrip the limited available capacity. This can lead to an unorganized environment teetering on the verge of chaos.
First things first – coach teams to adopt a consistent way of decomposing the incoming work requests. Classic agile decomposition is something along these lines: initiatives, features, and stories. Your work requests may come in as any of these types. For initiatives and features, decompose them all the way down into stories.
Make all work visible. Start with simple tooling or spreadsheets to capture your incoming work. As work progresses, indicate the current state within the tool. Shared Services team members may resist this at first as another “administrative task”, but in reality it is just as important as doing the work itself for awareness and course corrections. As coaches, we need to impress upon the team the importance of visualizing all work.
Ruthlessly prioritize all incoming work. Ask someone on the team to play the role of “backlog owner”. Work with the requestors to better understand their needs, and then make the tough prioritization decisions that will keep most of them happy. As coaches, we should coach the team, stakeholders, and customers to TRUST the prioritization decisions made by the backlog owner.
Facilitate sessions focused on defining the Definition of Ready (DoR) and the Definition of Done (DoD). Kanban teams should also define their policies for moving a work item from one column to another. These consensus-based working agreements and their use create an environment of stability and clarity.
Create a simple roadmap showing your planned work commitment for the current quarter. Additionally show 3 more quarters of forecasted work. Be sure and emphasize the word “forecast” on the future quarters to indicate a decent probability of changing. Share the roadmap out with your primary customers, stakeholders, and leadership. One interesting aspect of a roadmap is that it can also be used as a change management tool to engage in what-if scenarios when new requests are made.
Organizing the work will not lessen the demand. But it will provide an element of sanity in your daily activities. And we all deserve sanity!
3. Team Synchronization
A common anti-pattern seen in Shared Services teams is that each work item is worked on by a single person. When perpetuating this approach, we lose the opportunity for improved cycle time and on-the-job cross training.
Every Shared Services team should synchronize daily in a 15 – 30 minute event. The purpose of this event is to plan out the activities for today. Specific emphasis should be given to exploring opportunities to pair and swarm on work items as opposed to every team member working their work items individually.
As coaches, we need to coach the Shared Services team to achieve higher levels of self-management. This can be a challenge in some Shared Services teams where the team members are used to being told what to do and how to do it. In an Agile organization, teams are comprised of knowledge workers that are trusted to self-organize and self-manage their work using technical expertise and innovation.
Cross-training is an important aspect of team synchronization. Ideally, we want each team member to have at least one area of technical expertise along with several other areas of reasonably good expertise. This allows us considerably more flexibility when choosing work items. It also de-risks our deliveries as we can now deal with natural people outages due to vacations, illness, and attrition. Be sure and coach the team to allocate a percentage of their time (5 – 10%) in an ongoing fashion to work their personal cross-training plan.
Team synchronization is crucial for the team to start jelling as a true team instead of a collection of individuals.
4. Continuous Improvement
“We don’t have time to even think about improving!” is a common cry within Shared Services organizations.
As coaches, we must coach Shared Services teams to slow down in order to speed up. A common technique is to start a cadence of monthly retrospectives identifying one or two improvement items for the upcoming month. Be sure and make these items visible in your team backlog for transparency reasons.
Ideally the Shared Services team will be collecting a few impactful metrics through their Agile tooling, such as throughput and cycle time. Analyzing these metrics and exploring ways to improve upon them is an important aspect of the monthly retrospective.
Agile teams have a spirit of continuous improvement. They treat it seriously.
Wrap-Up
Coaching Shared Services organizations can be challenging but extremely rewarding. They are the glue that holds the product development teams and agile release trains together! Agile coaches should be aware of their unique considerations upon engagement.
This article discusses four focus areas when coaching Shared Services organizations. There are likely several more, such as customer engagement, coordinating work with other teams, dependency management, and others.
Here at Agile Authority, we provide Agile coaching and training services. Our coaches all have deep Agile, Kanban, and SAFe transformation experience across multiple engagements over the last 18 years. This allows us to provide pragmatic advice about when to use a specific practice and when not to. We also have 6 years of experience delivering high-quality SAFe training. Over these years we have learned how to ensure high levels of engagement from course attendees with fun and thought-provoking activities. Yes, even in a virtual class!
Contact us for your Agile/SAFe training needs here.
For more on SAFe, visit here. For more on what all is typically involved in an Agile transformation, visit here.