Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates
Si: Welcome Peter, thank you for taking the time to attend this annual performance review
Peter: As long as you know I don’t want to be here, performance reviews are pointless, I told that to my manager Roger. I should be at my desk coding.
Si: Yes, I understand your position, in fact many of us sympathise with it, including Roger and myself
Peter: Well, good, does he also agree that management is a waste of time? If we were really following Agile the way we should then Roger wouldn’t be getting in the way all the time and I could write more code.
Si: Yes, well, we’ve had that feedback from other people and the company is committed to change. In fact, one of the things I wanted to speak to you about today was to tell you Roger is stepping aside.
Peter: What?
Si: Yes, Roger is undertaking retraining and will become a Product Specialist, he himself rejected the title Product Manager because he doesn’t see the need for Managers and even refused the title Product Owner because he doesn’t feel he can “own†something that is a community effort and is ultimately owned by the company shareholders.
Peter: Wow… he has been listening to me?
Si: Yes, in my long conversations with him he has spoken many times of the points you have been making. Of course as part of the management team it wouldn’t have been right for him to speak about his changing views too publicly lest people wonder what was happening.
One of the things I wanted to discuss with you today was how we go about distributing Roger’s other responsibilities. As one the longest serving employees Roger suggested you would have the best insights.
Peter: Right, erh, so what responsibilities are these? – apart from asking me “how long will it take?â€
Si: Well some relate to the product. As Product Specialist he will continue to support sales staff making customer visits, he will continue administer the backlog, prioritise work in the planning meeting and draw-up the product roadmap – although he wants to involve more people and change the concept of a roadmap. He plans to increase the number of customer visits, competitor analysis and market scanning activities he has been doing already.
Peter: Good, we need a proper product owner, he was doing the role anyway but didn’t have enough time.
Si: Well yes, in fact he has also requested that you and the other engineers accompany him on customer visits in future.
Peter: What? – but our customers are everywhere but here!!! Saudi Arabia, Finland, Argentina, USA… it takes days to get to those places, I’m needed here, I need to be coding!
Si: Well I’ll let the two of you come to a decision on that. Right now we need to redistribute Roger’s work.
There are the administration matters, signing off holiday, arranging sabbaticals, maternity/paternity leave; the new monthly check-points replacing annual performance reviews need to be staffed. There is a lot of work around contractors, time-sheets, extensions and terminations, to be honest there are constant political battles over the number of contractors and whether we should be using them at all. Personally, I believe these changes will abolish office politics but some people think I’m being naive.
Anyway, a lot of this work could be for someone like myself in HR…
Peter: But that will slow everything down! HR is never responsive and most of them – unlike yourself – don’t know one end of a code stack from another
Si: Yes, quite right, HR is atrociously understaffed so we take forever to do anything, and many of my colleagues just aren’t close enough to the teams – frankly they don’t understand technology.
For those reasons the company is also closing the HR department. The work will be distributed to the teams. So my colleagues and I are all being made redundant. Some larger teams, such as yours, will be allowed to hire “Talent specialists†to help with recruitment matters and I hope to secure a such a job myself. But that also means members of your team will need to interview and select their own Talent Specialist. I expect you’ll be on the interview panel, I hope you will see the depth of my experience.
Peter: O, but we are all so busy coding, that will slow us down! And we don’t know anything about recruiting HR people. Can’t Roger arrange that before he leaves?
Si: Roger’s re-assignment is immediate, he insisted on it. I suggest you and your colleagues get started on selecting your Talent Specialist as quickly as possible.
Still, many of the things I just listed will not fall under the Talent Specialists remit. A self-managing team really should manage a lot of those things itself. The Talent Specialist will be there for staffing issues, CV filtering, negotiating with recruitment agents, diversity monitoring, visa applications, university recruitment fairs, exit interviews, legal issues, and so on.
Peter: Right, well I’m sure out team can dispense with a lot of the administration, we can trust one another to take holiday responsibly.
Si: Quite so, I’m sure you can organise away a lot of the admin work but there will be a rump.
Peter: Could we bring back the Scrum Masters?
Si: Well the Scrum Masters we had were always at pains to point out they were not managers or administrators – I know they are in some other places. Plus, they said they “did themselves out of a job†in the end and recommended their own removal.
Peter: Arh… I remember, I guess we will share the administration around the team. We can work out a process for that – the same as we do in planning meetings.
Si: Remember as you do that some of your team may need management training
Peter: What?
Si: Management, even administration, has its own on standards, rules, jargon, if members of your team are going to do administration and management work, let alone talk to others doing it then they need to know their CapEx from their OpEx, their 4 Ps from their 5 Forces, front-of-house from back-of-house, what you can and can’t say in an exit interview, a SWOT analysis from a …
Peter: Yes, yes I get it, a lot of mumbo jumbo if you ask me…
Si: All the same, is it fair to throw people in at the deep-end? Shouldn’t we help them learn if they want to?
Moving on next we come to Roger’s role in the hierarchy. Sharing company information down to the team and team information up the chain. Plus annual strategy meetings, quarterly reviews, product portfolio boards, key customer engagement.
Peter: We have Slack and Wiki’s so I’m sure we can manage the information alright.
Si: Arh… well, when we rolled this program out in Norway some of the teams tried just that. In a couple of months most of the team members were complaining about information overload. I believe the quote was “How can you expect me to do any coding when Slack keeps interrupting me?â€
Peter: Arhhh.
Si: And the Norwegian executives felt they never got a consistent message from the teams because different people would turn up to quarterly reviews each time while strategy sessions started to resemble a Stackover flow argument. Some customers complained that they no longer had a point of contact or got conflicting messages. And lets not even talk about the auditors.
Peter: Well the thing is, none of us have been trained in Strategy or, what did you call it? Portfolio review?
Si: Good thinking, I guess one of Roger’s strengths was the time he spent studying that on his American MBA. Do you want to arrange a coupe of days training in strategy and portfolio review for your team?
Peter: Erh, I’m not sure I know enough to book a training course, and isn’t that going to take people away from coding?
I mean the whole team, all 10 of us, out for 2 days training? And the people going to attend meetings with other departments and teams?
Si: Yes of course it is, but you will be self-managing. The team won’t have anyone else.
And mentioning the team, there is also another issue you’ve raised yourself in the past. Here we are, two very similar males discussing this. In fact your whole team is quite like the two of us. The team are going to have to challenge themselves to improve their diversity.
Peter: Right…
Look, we’ve been here half-an-hour and haven’t started even reviewing my performance, will this take much longer? I’ve got code to write.
Si: Well, there is quite a bit more of Roger’s work to discuss, plus his boss, Jane, is also stepping aside so we need to reconvene with people from the other teams to allocate her remaining work.
Peter: If we are self-managing, could we decide to employ a specialist to pick up a lot of this work?
Si: I expect you could, you’d need to put some costings together.
Peter: Right, I’ll talk it through with the team and see if we can hire a secretary.
Si: Good idea, although the secretary is going to need more than just typing skills.
Peter: Sure, secretary might be the wrong job title. We need someone with skills who we can trust to make these decisions, someone with experience.
Si: Although, you know, such a person may become a bit of a gate-keeper to the team
Peter: Certainly, thats what we need, we don’t want interruptions!
Si: Well, the problem with a gate keeper is that they decide what goes through the gate and what does not. That gives them a degree of power.
And if someone is picking up all the left over work, making decisions for the team, and controlling access to the team, and information flows into and out of the team…
Peter: Yes, is there a problem? That all sounds good to me, this gate keeper will have the power to defend the team
Si: Well… what I was about to say is such a person might be seen by some as having authority… and how will the team members feel about someone else deciding what is told to others?
Peter: Well, we could review their decisions and tell them what to do
Si: Yes… well, that might be seen as a lacking trust or even micro-manegement…
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