Change is hard, and as much as we want simple, formulaic answers, each situation is different. Many process improvement books offers answers, but the approaches are often narrow or make assumptions about your organization. Deliver Better Results by Gil Broza will help you to understand where you are, how to identify where you want to be, and provide a step by step guide for navigating the path to your destination.
Gil Broza is particularly good at helping people bridge the gap between technology, people, and process, something I first noticed in his book The Human Side of Agile. he continues this theme in this book, which describes principles for improving a software development organization starting with a framework for identifying areas to improve, and following up with steps to take to reach the goal. Each part of the journey offers options; while teams that need to improve share common themes ,no two teams are exactly alike, so a “one-size-fits-all” approach doesn’t work. Context matters.
Context is a recurring theme in this book, at all scales. Often people looking to improve their delivery outcomes are looking for an answer: a set of process changes that will work. Broza makes clear that the right approach depends on where you are in your improvement journey, and the context that exists at each level (team, department, organization, etc) and that you will need to inspect and adapt along the way.
As an example of a context motivated approach vs a cookbook one: consider decision making: it seems axiomatic that a bias towards centralized decision making is a bottleneck; the people closest to the problem are often best suited to make decisions. But a consensus driven approach can become a bottleneck when all those involved don’t have all the information or the decision is low risk (so you can change it) or time sensitive (the probability+cost of waiting is higher than the probability + cost of a wrong decision), and in those cases having a person or small group own the decision. The “it depends” approach can be off-putting to some looking for a quick fix, but Broza guides you through the rationale, helping you to maintain a sustainable path to improvement.
Another recurring theme that is both very important and often ignored: Systems thinking. Broza emphasizes the importance of considering the whole system involved in delivery. This seems obvious, but we are often tempted simplify a problem by making an educated guess about where the problem is and fixing the local change. While that can occasionally work, you often end up with minimal change, or sometimes a worse problem. For example, while it might be tempting to start with restructuring a team that appears to be underperforming, the real impediments might be in the planning or organization culture, so consider introducing changes to those. (This approach reminds me of a Thermodynamics Problems that I had in college: defining the system boundary is key. Get that wrong and you either can’t solve the problem, or get the wrong answer, often after doing a lot of work.)
Broza also make it clear that the people on the team matter. Technology changes can be valuable, but their main value is how they help people perform.
This isn’t a “fix it all at once” guide. Such approaches rarely work in software systems, much less human ones, and since each step changes the system, it would be impossible to address all the issues with one set of changes. This incremental approach also works with the human tendency to accept smaller units of change better than larger ones.
You might find your self thinking that some of the ideas are obvious. In some ways, they are: the book focuses on people, and since teams are made of people, taking care of team dynamics is important. This “obvious” thinking is often ignored. Many change guides focus almost exclusively on tools or process, but by putting them at the center you avoid the real issues. Gil Broza puts people front and center. Which sadly is all too rare.
Deliver Better Results is full of practical, valuable, advice that is too often ignored. If you want to understand and improve team deliver, Deliver Better Results will be worth your time.
The Amazon Links in the article are associates links, and if you are interested in buying the book, I’d appreciate your using them. This post was based on a review copy of the final book.