The Roadmap

The first milestone is to get the team comfortable with the ideas and strategy of measuring development pain.   Setup an Open Mastery Circle at your company, starting as a reading group for Idea Flow: How to Measure the Pain in Software Development.  Free e-books provided for all attendees.

We’ll break up the reading into three chunks, and setup webinar Q&A sessions for discussing the ideas as a community.   You can also ask questions on Slack at anytime.

Next, the developers record their very first Idea Flow Maps.  Since recognizing Idea Flow events is difficult at first, we highly recommend learning this skill in a pair programming context.  The Circle Leader sets up a weekly “Focus Meeting” to review the Idea Flow Maps and discuss the causes of friction as a team.

There’s a lot of nuances to Idea Flow data collection that aren’t covered in the book, so we’ll be augmenting the material with webinars, articles, examples and demos as questions come up in the community.

After collecting data for one month, the team starts categorizing the pain into broad categories or “pain types” as described in the book, and looking for patterns in the causes of friction, and tagging the problems by type.

The Circle Leader supports the team in analyzing the data, focusing the discussion around identifying the causes of pain and writing up lessons learned from the meetings.  The Circle Leader creates the initial glossary of patterns that the team works together to maintain.

To dig into the causes of pain and explore strategies for improvement, the Circle Leader schedules an online problem-solving session with the Open Mastery community.  We’ll follow the “F.O.C.O.L Point” Mastery Circle meeting format in the online discussion (Focus. Observe. Conclude. Optimize. Learn) to maximize the depth of learning and help the team identify a good strategy for improvement.

The Circle Leader takes on the role of “Risk Translator” and starts providing monthly “visibility updates” to management.  The Risk Translator summarizes the high-level problems and lessons learned by translating the development problems into the language of indirect cost and risk.

The Risk Translator partners with management to kickoff a 3-month data-driven improvement trial with dedicated development capacity for reducing friction.  The Risk Translator continues to provide monthly visibility updates to share the team’s discoveries about emergent risks, and discusses priorities for which problems are the most important to solve with management.

Once the dedicated improvement effort is supported by management, the team adopts a more rigorous discipline around continuous learning and improvement.

The Idea Flow Continuous Improvement Framework is a team-level strategy and reflection protocol for maximizing the amount of learning from each coding experience.  “Strategy Design” and “Experience Review” sessions are done as adhoc peer-level discussions with each task.

Discussions in “Open Mastery Circles” are limited to experiences that are relevant to the team’s improvement focus.  The team chooses a single pain type to focus on for the improvement effort, and identifies the biggest problems to solve.