The Subtle Art of Jelling
A simple framework for team assessment and some common use cases.
Motivation#
I was reading An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson and this created so many ideas and thoughts that I am going to do some blog posts on my thoughts on some concepts. Some are related to the book, others not so much. Hopefully some ideas will be useful.
Teams#
Teams are the fundamental unit of innovation and disruption in an organization. This is the most profound axiom of any organization. An individual is an insufficient unit of capacity to actuate change, in order to generate change an individual must be a catalyst of a team or a chain of teams.
Therefore, it is paramount to understand what is a team and how to qualify its health. In order to analyze a team I think of a framework of four different values: performance, potential, impact and cohesion.
Performance#
Performance is a team’s ability to achieve or surpass what it proposes to achieve. In other words, if a team is using scrum and delivering sprints, a performant team is a team that is consistently able to deliver the sprint. This of course assumes that the product owner is happy with the scheduled work for the sprint.
This is the most transparent value, any team is measured by what it delivers, by the amount and quality of the deliverables. All managers want to increase the team performance, in other words, deliver more, faster and with more quality. In essence to increase the team productivity.
In itself performance is a snapshot metric and is insufficient to give a broad picture of the team state, it’s relationship with the organization and long term progression.
Potential#
Potential can be understood as the team’s ability to be ever more performant. A team that only has very senior members is a team with low potential, but with a high performance, and a team of only junior developers may have a lot of potential but low performance.
This is another metric that often creates a lot of confusion and bewilderment to manager folks. It is common for managers to be frustrated at a team member with a lot of potential, but that makes some trivial errors or that goes into fools errands.
It is common to increase the work payload/complexity of team members or teams that exhibit promise, but without due caution they may fail as the realization of potential into the ability to perform is often not a linear path.
It is also common for managers to be frustrated at senior teams for them not being able to increase their performance throughout time, forgetting that if they are already very senior, probably they don’t have big margins for performance gain.
Impact#
A different metric is organizational impact or how does the team influence the organization as a whole.
Is the work of that team affecting a lot of other components inside the organization?
For example, a specialty team focused on an application that has no great externalities is probably a team with a low organizational impact. A team that is working on migrating the database technology probably has a big impact as it has a lot of externalities. If the technology provides a performance improvement, that improvement will be felt by all other applications that interact with the database. One other key aspect is more commercial or business oriented, which is to think if that team has a big impact in the overall strategy or viability of the company and if it has an impact in revenue generation, future or present.
Teams that deliver fast and quality work on areas that are not strategic for the organization or that do not have ROI are as a whole failing to have impact. These teams are always on the cusp of being shelved as they have low visibility for the wider organization and may seem like they are redundant.
Teams that have a high impact and a low performance are one of the most hated teams in your organization. They are affecting the organization as a whole but are not delivering at a fast enough pace to mitigate issues that they are causing. This creates a lot of pushback against that team as they will be widely perceived as incompetent. Typically these teams will be quick to suffer upper management intervention as customers or other team leads will complain about the collateral damage.
Cohesion#
Cohesion is a multi-dimensional perspective. Team cohesion is very important as a low cohesion can foster disengagement and harm the team viability. A different perspective is organizational cohesion, how does the team engage with the organization as whole.
If a team has a very low organizational cohesion, it can generate silos and interpersonal conflicts between other parts of the organization. With a low organizational cohesion a team has a very low chance of having impact as they will have a low ability to generate a change to how the other parts of the organization work. If you build a test framework that saves a lot of time for your team and try to pitch that solution to other teams, if there’s little goodwill chances are that no one will listen. This is a very common problem for teams that are highly analytical and focused on technology, which often project an image of paternalism and arrogance, without human informal power you are highly unlikely to have impact outside your team.
On the flip side if a team has a low internal cohesion, it will inevitably have a low performance and it will severely hamper their potential. A team is an opportunity for the whole to be greater than its parts, but actually a low moral team is not just the sum of its parts, it’s much worse than that and can create a lot of conflict and waste of time.
Solving Problems#
Economy is the science that studies the allocation of scarce resources. Management is alike, in the sense that with infinite time and team capacity one does not require any kind of consideration on management.
Therefore, I want to discuss typical problems and common strategies to solve those problems and what are the downsides of choosing one solution or other.
Lack of Time#
Delivering ever faster services and goods is always a force that acts upon the manager.
Even in a perfect scenario where he has everything under a miraculous steady state, with a shift of some market constraint (like a new buzzword) or with some C level seeing a youtube video, his whole perfect master plan is disrupted.
Let’s imagine the typical scenario of a team has to deliver a feature that was scaled for 6 months shifting the goal post to 3 months. How does the manager address this problem?
First, he should do what any good manager should do, which is protect his teams allocation and push back against arbitrary decisions. Most of the times this is a windmill fighting scenario, typically the windmill wins.
He will therefore try to talk with his team and understand if there are trade offs to be made, baroque features that can be trimmed out, MVPs that can be carved out and ways to reduce complexity and lower the time to delivery. Let’s say he decreases one month, he is still missing 2 months, what can he do?
Adding Team Capacity#
“If one woman gives birth one baby in 9 months, it is obvious that nine women give birth to one baby in 1 month.”
This is the allegory of the first pitfall, this is the most basic pitfall of all.
If you walk through life without understanding this, you are just waiting for the piano to fall down on your head and trust me, It will.
If it’s so basic why do we constantly fall for this?
It’s intuitive. Human beings have an innate difficulty with unintuitive thinking. In the land of objects and abstractions (like mathematics (also known to managers as MS Excel spreadsheets)) it is evident that if I have available resources on one side and I need more capacity on another, I will just keep adding resources.
Why is this problematic? Adding team members creates a lot of trade offs.
In the short term it reduces overall team performance and cohesion, it is inevitable that even very senior personnel will need to gain context of the project of team and of how the proverbial sausage is made.
Be wary of this initial performance impact, if you are facing a time crunch this may be suicidal. Also, bear in mind that the rest of the team when pressed for time, may be very adverse in investing time in training the new member, particularly if he is seen as someone that is just there for a limited amount of time.
A functional team may look robust like a robust mast on your ship, but often than not it’s more similar to the last play of a Jenga game. Keep in mind that every time you cause team disruption you are removing and adding a wood plank in the Jenga tower.
You will be reducing initial performance and severely impacting the team cohesion, in search of a possible future gain in performance.
Adding Teams#
Adding teams is an interesting approach.
The first question you must ask is, is my feature set mature enough or prepared enough for it to be shared cross teams. For most of the teams and product owners I’ve seen, the answer is no.
This means that in order for you to have a second team working in the project, either at full or partial capacity, you will have to have a really well prepared backlog and a lot communication between team leads. You will be always facing the concern of having one team waiting on another team, so you must minimize blocking points. I’ve often seen the value of having an additional daily session (even if not everyday), between the team leads and the product owner do the trick on having everything streamlined.
A second question is, do these teams have a high organizational cohesion? If you join two teams with low organizational cohesion, you will have a big risk of interpersonal conflicts, bad communication and inefficiency. Remember that joint ventures, can be a very good in knowledge sharing and team growth, but at the same time if there are personal conflicts it can also push teams away of the organization and create high attrition.
MVP Team#
You need things to get done fast. Just get the people that do things fast together and Puff everything is solved. Oh boy if only life was that easy…
Let me first start with saying, sometimes this is an inevitability. Let’s face it, if you are a startup and you need to rush to market and you are living day by day, maybe for a period of time you have to be laser focused on what needs to be shown to your investors or small user base. If you are a company with a long term aspiration this can be a very bad idea.
Having an MVP means removing people that were in other teams and pool those high performers into a team of high performers. These types of teams tend to have low potential, low cohesion and a good local impact but very bad overall trickle down organizational impact.
By pooling away a team MVP means, that you are removing someone from an ecosystem where he’s thriving and is excellent into a new environment. All teams have a normal distribution of talent and achievement, you may be skillful and ably build a team that has people that are all high achievers in different dimensions of what makes a team great. Nevertheless, If you pool a team where all are amazing technical people, how will they cope when they are no longer the technical expert? Will they thrive or are they going to lose moral.
My experience is that most teams like this have a very low team cohesion and fall into the pitfall of trying to spend the time one upping themselves, instead of solving issues.
What about the teams they left? All their stats will decrease, their performance will fall as they no longer have the highest achiever, their potential will fall, as they lose the team member that was teaching and helping the team as whole. As the team understands that their overall stats have decreased, cohesion also starts to deteriorate as people feel that they are regressing instead of improving.
Finally, what does everyone else in the organization think about having a team hoard all the cool and innovative stuff? Yeah, they don’t like it. You are signaling to everyone else, that if there’s an A team and you’re not on it, means that you’re on the B team. This means that by creating an MVP team, you are not just reducing the performance of the teams affected, but you will heavily impact the global team performance and create a stratified corporate culture. This also means that as organizational coesion decreases, the organizational impact will also heavily decrease. In other words, If I’m not in the A team, the organization doesn’t value me, and if the organization doesn’t value me and my input I won’t work on things that value not just my team but the whole organization.
Do nothing#
Sometimes, no action is the best action.
Trust your teams, explain what are the constraints and create reward incentives for them achieving this extra mile, but trust that your team can have periods of 120% if they know the outcome, they know that everyone is rowing to the same side and after a milestone is reached they will have breathing room and time for under 100% performance. Also, don’t change strategies, predictability is key, people are able to bear what they know. If you keep surprising the team with added effort and problems they will turn off and start ignoring your goals. Protect your team from noise, when you need peak performance you need to protect the team from external factors. If what the team is doing is the priority they need to feel that it’s really a priority. This will be a time where the impact of the team for other initiatives will be put in the back burner.
In this example, blue is the previous state and green is the new state, we see that we are able to raise the team overall performance and the cohesion as the team grows stronger together through controlled adversity. The potential decreases marginally as some of that potential is realized in performance (this is not actual the case as potential can also grow with performance) and as the team cohesion with the organization and knowledge base grows it also increases the organizational impact.
The scope may be so extensive that this approach is not possible and you are forced to add more capacity, but a lot of times the best solution is trusting your team to handle it. This will increase team cohesion as in times of some stress people tend to get closer and it will also, help to realize some team potential as it will be a time of increased team focus.
Note that your pushing a team for a certain period of time. Not all people are the same, not all teams are the same, it’s up to you as a manager to evaluate the team resiliency and monitor how the attrition of the team is evolving. Remember that attrition is not a function of workload, it is highly correlated to all these facets. For example, a team that has a high cohesion and perceives a high organizational impact will have a lower attrition rate.
What about Jelling#
Well, the undertone of all of this is jelling matters. People are people, we could wish they weren’t, we can complain, shout and squirm, but reality always wins.
You know Bob and Tod that are aces together, they’ve worked together for 5 years and have a lot of respect for each other. Bob he’s a genius, he knows the architecture like the palm of his hand, but he only works well with Tod, cause they’ve been through hell and back and Tod is the human interface to Bob. Change Tod to another team and his technical weaknesses start to show. Change Bob to be a team lead and brace yourselves for the never ending soap opera, of a an elephant on the china store of human interactions.
Managers are people and they see a problem and want to mitigate it. They have a big red button called reshuffle and damn how tempting is to press it. It’s like a Casino dealer reshuffling all the cards and suddenly you have a new game. Changing the cards has a steep cost. People that work together well are something to foster and cultivate.
Does this mean you should never reshuffle? No, sometimes pressing the red button is the only way forward, particularly for situation of a global low team cohesion rate throughout the organization. But never be rash, most of the times, trusting your teams and trusting them to rise above the challenges is the best approach.
Cohesion is one of the key elements of any team and is I think a severely forgotten aspect. A team’s ability to work together and work with the organization is a key indicator for long term success.
Final Thoughts#
How do your teams stack up? Try and build your own team charts. Do an introspection and try to give values for all these fields. This will give you of an overview of your knowledge about the teams you manage and of how balanced they are.
Only when you understand your team landscape can you start optimizing your organization. Remember, teams are the fundamental unit of change and your goals a manager is to be a catalyst for positive change in your organization.