Guillaume Marceau will present his innovative solution to portfolio and resource management: firepower. With firepower, Guillaume is able to allocate multiple resources across dozens of ongoing parallel initiatives, while avoiding over-committing and preserving the ability to adjust each week. Firepower enables IT to provide full visibility into the way IT resources are being allocated, so we can be sure that what we are doing matches the strategic business goals. Firepower runs on top of JIRA, and incorporates daily statistics so we know what people _actually_ worked on as opposed to what we planned to work on. At BrightPower, firepower has transformed the conversation between business and IT, helping to set expectations and enable IT and business to engage in meaningful strategic dialog. Firepower sharpened everyone’s perception and enabled them to focus on the most important initiatives. It communicates in a simple and visceral way how our limited IT resources are deployed, and the fact that adding another active task has to be balanced with reducing efforts elsewhere or adding capability.
We are super excited to see Guillaume demonstrate this solution, because too many times we have seen and lived the alternatives.
It doesn’t matter how agile specific teams are if management keeps jamming too much work into the system, they will not be effective they will spend too much time task switching. Also it doesn’t matter how reliably and with quality teams deliver software; if the expectations of management are so far out of line, they will still be perceived as not delivering.
20. Firepower Tracking
The project is not done yet because…
• Implementation proceeded slowly
or
• We tried to do everything at once
(10 projects assigned to a 5-devs team)
25. The Firepower Trick
• Record which tickets are in flight
• as well as who is working on which
• You already have this information!
• Jira + Stand up
28. Firepower: Resource Management
In a given week…
• If we work on 1 projects, it gets 100% of the firepower
• If we work on 2 projects, they get 50% of the firepower
• If we work on 4 projects, they get 25% of the firepower
• If we work on 10 projects, they get 10% of the firepower
• …
I love planes. That feeling as the machine takes into the air with elegance and ease. All the power delivered by the engine, and the extend of the trust that we put into these engine to take us into the air.
That’s what software development feels to me. When my team is working well, writing awesome code, have a great time, having an impact.
And of course releases feel like landing a plane. With calm confidence. On an engineering level, the task is really intricate, but the pilot’s training is so thorough, that all we see is professional control and ease.
Do your releases feel like this? Does your team’s day-to-day feel like this?
It’s a French Canadian access. I am from Montreal! I did my undergrad at McGill university, a long time ago, came to the states for grad school, was a research scientist for quite a few years. And now I make a living transforming teams to top-performance.
We will get data – I will run a survey at the end of the talk. And we will get some data of whether any of this was intelligible, useful or interesting.
That is a very good question.
Sefaira / Body Labs / Whereat / Lilypad / Professional coaching / Bright Power
There is a collection of very difficult questions that we encounter while doing software development.
We have a financing deadline in 9 months. We have to show we can build something, that we are competent, that we can build something useful, hopefully sell a few, demonstrate traction.
We have a square + circle situation, like in Apollo 13. The answer, don’t go to space in Apollo 13, you know what’s going to happen.
At the beginning of the project, get enough confidence about the size of the effort, that we go look for something else to do.
The spec is, we are going to do “stuff”
The people tasked to raise the funding imagine a big splash project that will make the fundraising possible.
The devs imagine something small enough to fit in the time available.
Story mapping
Do you know why they are called stories? Two rules: someone does something because they want something. The person goes on the blue postit, the action goes on the yellow post it.
This is incredibly illuminating
Break into ticket – even sized pieces of work
S/M/L -- we did it with AA/A/9V batteries :-)
but you have to convince the CEO!
S/M/L with two teams, then demonstrate that the estimates agree
Look, we all agree, I even have to math to prove it, there is a lot of work there.
Survey, calibrating against recently closed ticket. Was this S/M/L? How long did it take?
It’s very important that you do this, you are trying to work with the data that you already have.
The process that generated the estimate is the same as the one that generated the calibration.
Droggy developer, snatched out of their focus to come to some project planning.
Except, for one big important difference
For the calibration, all the surprises have already happened.
But when you are here, you don’t know what is going to happen next. The tree are obscuring the forest. You have to account for that.
You know the rest of forest is there, you just can’t see the individual tree, and you can’t be sure just how many.
UFO: Unforeseen Work due to Occlusion.
If you have any downstream plan, then 8 is the most important number on this page. In all likelihood, we will ship inside of 8 weeks, but you can’t bank on that.
At Sefaira, the indecisive CEO, who always shows up at your desk with a new pet project idea that has to be done now
At Bright Power, 10 departments that have no visibility on each other’s request. They just know their stuff sure is important.
You need to be able to motivate your stakeholder to become more decisive – for their own
The project is not done yet because…
Implementation proceeded slowly
or
We tried to do everything at once
good. Decisiveness in Software Product decision making is super hard. They need all the help we can give them.
If your team is solid, it’s always going to be the second, so it is really is just a matter of providing the visibility and clarity of dignanostic.
If you are contracting, then you are already punching hours. No problem.
But with an internal team, getting people to punch time means pulling hair, and bad data.
Dot product – I just love that I can use linear algebra in Excel
Bool to int conversion
Array formula
In production, it’s implemented in Python. It fetches the list of tickets automatically from Jira and persists the data in mysql.
This is a trick but it’s super important!! --- It saves you from a rebellions and it gives you better data
If you are contracting, then you are already punching hours. No problem.
But with an internal team, getting people to punch time means pulling hair, and bad data.