Small, cross-functional teams are the "bread & butter" of Agile environments. Amongst many advantages, they help remove delays introduced by dependencies between groups. Unfortunately, many organizations find it difficult to reorganize their teams to be cross-functional, and even when they do, it's practically impossible to remove all dependencies, leaving many teams in the need to find ways to orchestrate work across various groups that work using different processes. This talk will explore the problem of intra-team dependencies, its impact in Customer flow, and practical strategies team-level leaders (as well as system-level leaders) can apply to help make the whole system more responsive, fit-for-purpose, and agile. In particular, the talk will describe Dynamic Reservation Systems, an advanced dependency management technique. -- Presented at the Toronto Agile Conference, Nov 6, 2020

1. Agile
Dependencies
SquirrelNorth
FERNANDO CUENCA
fernando@squirrelnorth.com
W h e n “ g o i n g C r o s s - F u n c t i o n a l ”
i s n o t a n o p t i o n
12th Annual Conference
November 6th, 2020
Starting at 2:30pm

2. SquirrelNorth
CONSULTING | TRAINING | COACHING
MARTIN AZIZ FERNANDO CUENCA JAMES STEELE ALEXEI ZHEGLOV

3. Dependencies
BETWEEN TEAMS
SOUNDS FAMILIAR?
Application Team
Customer
Marketing Team
Release Team
Feature Teams
Application Team 1
DBA Team
Application Team 2

4. Dependencies
BETWEEN TEAMS
“CROSS-FUNCTIONAL” TEAMS TO THE RESCUE!
WHY CAN’T WE HAVE THIS?
Reorganize!

5. Dependencies
BETWEEN TEAMS
PRACTICAL LIMITS TO X-FUNCTIONALITY
WE CAN’T WISH DEPENDENCIES AWAY
Economic
Realities
Cost & Stress of
Reorganizations
Availability of
Specialized
Expertise
Bounded Context
Conceptual Integrity
I need this!
I got it!
End-to-End
Flow
“Organizational structures are
fragile, services are robust” –
Alexei Zheglov

6. Dependencies
BETWEEN TEAMS
• RELIABILITY &
PREDICTABILITY
• AVOIDING
OVERLOADING
Customer-facing
Services
Customer-facing
Services
Internal Shared
Services
Service
Delivery
Manager
(SDM)
MODELING

7. Lead Time SLA:
• Standard = 3 weeks
• Fixed Date = 1 week +
Guaranteed Reservation
COLLABORATIVE
ORCHESTRATION OF WORK
RESERVATION SYSTEM
Reservation Classes

8. COLLABORATIVE
ORCHESTRATION OF WORK
UNDER THE HOOD
Meaningful
difference by
“Class of Service”
3 weeks1 week
Fixed Date
Standard
8 + 6 + 6 = 20 = Avg
Predictable
Throughput, with
“rich range”
Compact Lead
Time Distribution
days
weeks
10
20
30
itemcount
frequency
Avg = 20
Max = 33
Min = 8
Lead Time SLA:
• Standard = 3 weeks
• Fixed Date = 1 week +
Guaranteed Reservation

9. COLLABORATIVE
ORCHESTRATION OF WORK
IT DIDN’T START THAT WAY
“Fat Tail” Lead Time
Distribution
Frequent weeks
with 0 deliveries
Erratic Throughput
UNPREDICTABLE SERVICE
15 weeks
10
20
30
Min = 0
Avg
Max
Mostly fixed-date,
with low on-time
performance
Low Average

10. COLLABORATIVE
ORCHESTRATION OF WORK
IT’S NOT A PLANNING PROBLEM
“We all need to
collaborate to improve”The LT of your dependencies
is embedded in your LT
Uncoordinated customer-facing requests
can overload the shared service
If your dependencies are
unreliable, you will be
unreliable as well

11. Taking action
to improve
IT STARTS WITH SEEING
Visual Model
Add Product
to Shopping
Cart
Test server
unavailable
Date: 24/10/2018
Blocker
Clustering
Instrumentation
to measure flow
Environment
Outage
Missing
Information
SME
availability
Sources of Delay
• Multitasking & Preemption
• Queues & Buffers
• Dependencies
• Impediments
• Failure Demand

12. Taking action
to improve
TRIMMING THE TAIL LEFT-SHIFTING THE DISTRIBUTION
Delays
produce
the “tail”
Worst
Case
Acceptable
Case
• WIP Constraints
• Queue/Batch Size Reduction
• Blocker Escalation Policies
• Strengthened DoR
• Failure Demand Reduction
Improvement
Gap

13. BETTER RELIABILITY CAN CHANGE THE CONVERSATION
ON THE ROAD
OF IMPROVEMENT
NOT EVERYTHING HAS TO BE “FIXED DATE”
“I don’t need to
impose a ‘deadline’
on everything”
“I don’t need to ask for an
estimate for everything”
More tolerance
to delays
Time Sensitive
“I can give
different treatment
to work items”

14. “LET IT BE” CAN BE AN OPTION
ON THE ROAD
OF IMPROVEMENT
NOT EVERY ITEM REQUIRES UPFRONT
DEPENDENCY MANAGEMENT
Dependency
Discovery
Up-front Dependency
Discovery
Fixed Date
Standard
“Fast track” to
Development
Early
Engagement of
Dependencies
”Let it be! Let it be!

15. AN EXPLICIT CONTRACT
ON THE ROAD
OF IMPROVEMENT
Customer Urgency
-
+
Dependency Management Treatment (Class of Service)
Intangible Let it be! Intangible
Standard Let it be! Standard
Expedite Let it be! Expedite
Fixed Date Upfront Detection Fixed Date

16. A MORE NUANCED CONTRACT
ON THE ROAD
OF IMPROVEMENT
Customer Urgency
-
+
Dependency Management Treatment (Class of Service)
Intangible Let it be! Intangible
Standard w/SLE Let it be! Standard
Expedite Let it be! Expedite
Standard w/Deadline Let it be! Fixed DateStand by
Fixed Date Upfront Detection Fixed DateReserved
Fixed Date w/Zero Tolerance Upfront Detection Fixed DateGuaranteed
Explicit
dependency
management
needed only for
“true” Fixed Date
demand
(15%).
Reservation required to
commit
(part of DoR)

17. There are practical
limits to cross-
functionality.
NOT A ”PLANNING” OR
“SCHEDULING” PROBLEMNO WISHFUL THINKING
STRIVE FOR RELIABLE, PREDICTABLE INTERACTIONS
SquirrelNorth
s q u i r r e l n o r t h . c o m
Agile
Dependencies
W h e n
“ g o i n g C r o s s -
F u n c t i o n a l ”
i s n o t a n
o p t i o n
Unpredictable dependencies will
make you unpredictable too.
Collaborate to
“trim the tail”
Grow Trust to
reduce the need
of imposed
deadlines.
“Let it be! Let it be”
may just be
enough
(given reasonable predictability!)
Think
Probabilistically
about
Scheduling

18. https://www.kanbanmaturitymodel.com/

19. SquirrelNorth
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Agile
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W h e n
“ g o i n g C r o s s -
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+
THANK YOU!
Q & A
FERNANDO CUENCA
fernando@squirrelnorth.com
@fer_cuenca