Exploring how morale and motivation within your teams can align to bring significant strategic growth with purpose-driven delivery
by Mark McKee, 27 May 2023
Today, teams use test-driven development when being disciplined about the quality of their software as code changes are made. Mature teams in the past decade have made use of behaviour-driven development for setting out automated test criteria that allows them to verify the functionality of entire components as they change. Any defects automatically get picked up when teams are putting the given, when, then… language as acceptance-criteria statements in the user stories. By using BDD tooling, the functionality gets exercised at every build of the codebase. The innovation of BDD is that for a user story to meet its definition of “done”, the person assigned to the story is verifying the work with tests that, if successful, allow them to approach the product owner with confidence that the story is ready for acceptance. This is the essence of continuous delivery.
The next stage is being able to join up the work done at the story/sprint/team level with what is important for the organisation. It’s interesting that the term “the business” still connotes a them-and-us mentality of software engineers doing work for another group. I find this somewhat quaint when, in our digital world, the software products today ARE the business! So, to get to what is important for the business (all of us!), modern-thinking leaders are expressing what they need to do in terms of OKRs (objectives and key results). What does this have to do with the teams? If we do lots of great work to deliver new product features, but they aren’t growing the business or making clients happier, what exactly is the value of the work being done? Many times, in my role as a tech leader over the years, team members have asked where their efforts fitted into the big picture. This is an important question, and one that speaks to the need to have your output as part of something larger than the team and the sprint you are working within.
This has become much more relevant with the conjunction of OKRs and agile ways of working. If you have clearly defined outcomes within a quarter that everyone within the value stream is aware of, then the point and purpose of delivering within that quarter becomes bound up with the key results. People can then make much more focused planning activities for the quarter, as the work is designed around measurable key results. It’s worth noting here that you can’t hide from OKRs. If the work that teams are delivering does not impact on the key results (even when they are lagging, i.e., we see new customers sign up in the quarter after we brought that new feature to them), they can still be measured for effectiveness. Our work is only really a hypothesis: we can’t tell with any great degree of certainty if what we do will have the desired impact. That’s why we work in short cycles (sprints), to get feedback on what we are doing and if it will bring value in terms of the key results. If not, we pivot, and at worst, we have only wasted a couple of weeks. One of my clients was very smart about this recently, having achieved buy-in from customers on a new product by putting together a realistic-looking mock-up of how it would work. Once the customers gave it the green light, the end-to-end work started in order to bring a simulated product to life. Each sprint demo is showing the reduction of the simulator and the addition of end-to-end working features, as part of an incremental delivery.
Purpose-driven delivery is a vital way of being able to compete more effectively in a digital marketplace, as it motivates teams to do the right thing and tune out irrelevant requests that will distract from the mission for that quarter. In summary, well-communicated OKRs for the quarter allow for more focused planning. People get a sense of how their work impacts key results and everyone is part of the strategic outcomes for the business. Try this and see morale and motivation within your teams skyrocket!
Talk to us to find out more about how purpose-driven delivery can steer your business.
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