BA 37/52: Energy Spend (The Annual Planning Edition)
This piece is part of an ongoing stream of thought on Systems of Work. Together, these individual pieces form a playbook on how TPMs can leverage their skills to help teams do the work of doing work effectively.
Why should I read this post?
Planning season is upon us and I have some observations to share to help you navigate this annual shindig.
All organizations function by spending energy which comes in few forms: money, time, human resources.
The most precious and scarce resource is time.
In my opinion, one of the important primary directives of a TPM organization is to help an engineering organization spend its time well.
An organization spends Time in two modes: strategic, tactical.
These two modes operate in an equilibrium where spending in one category means reducing in another.
Every agile system or fancy cure all methodology will fail without maintaining these two modes in equilibrium.
I outline my observations of what I have seen with how high-performing organizations spend their time versus low performance organizations having worked on both these types of teams:
High-performing teams focus more on tactical energy spend with strategic energy spend peppered at the right opportune time to course correct the tactical energy spend.
Low-performing or stagnant teams always over spend in strategic or tactical without recognizing it.
A System Thinker’s Observations on Time in Engineering Organizations
All Systems spend energy in order to produce an output. Same is true for engineering organizations which is as complex a system as it can get.
Money, Time, and Human Resources are the three primary types of energy an engineering organization spends to build products and services. More precious of the three is time.
Money you can get more of (fund raising, prize increases, loans) and Human Resources, well you can always find bodies to throw at a problem (hire more, hire contractors, etc) but Time is never created or replicated, it is always borrowed from the future. It’s by-product is opportunity cost.
An engineering organization spends Time in many ways:
meetings
discussions between engineers or teams
writing code
design specs
developing PRDs
writing status
creating roadmaps
new CI/CD strategy
new strategic initiatives
new hiring plans
growth plans
everything we do, processes and frameworks, it requires time.
Companies that are well established or organizations with healthy budgets and stable product and service offerings, they can afford to spend time more freely. Startups do not have the luxury of time. Everything they do is a race against a ticking clock.
So, how should an organization its time wisely? To answer that, there are certain patterns and truths you must understand.
Let me explain:
An organizations time spend can be grouped into two modes:
Strategic
Tactical
These two modes always operate in equilibrium.
To spend time in strategic mode, you must reduce the time in tactical and vice versa.
High Performance Organizations (HPOs) have managed to find a great balance and perfected the timing for switching between these two modes.
Low Performance Organizations (LPOs) tend to always stay in one mode far longer than needed. When faced with lackluster performance, they dig themselves out by increasing spend in the mode they operate most in, thinking that to be the solution. Doubling down.
What does that look like in real life?
LPOs have certain patterns when it comes to time spend. Here is what I have observed in my career:
The teams that are revving on all cylinders yet cannot make “gains” end up spending majority of their time in tactical mode:
“I have work lined up for 4 sprints, my teams have no room to breath, but I can’t tell if this is the right work to focus on. We just have to show results.”
“We are agile, I don’t have time to waste on “waterfall style” planning, I need to start shipping things otherwise I will have to explain our low performance to leadership.”
“I need to figure out how to squeeze this 3month effort into 3wks.”
“Don’t worry about the strategic roadmap, we just need ship more faster so we can do more.”
The teams that have grand plans yet nothing to show in terms of execution, you guessed it, are spending more time in strategic mode:
“We have built this same roadmap 5 times in the last quarter and yet leadership is never satisfied or consensus alludes us.”
“Just when I have nailed down the path forward, some new team has an issue and new requirements are business critical.”
“We have reworked this schedule 3 times already and leadership still wants it shorter.”
“Leadership keeps doing these offsite about 2 year roadmaps but it never translates into action.”
“The strategy isn’t ready, we need more time to think through things, there are two many edge cases.”
How can TPMs help organizations spend time effectively?
If Product sets the direction and Engineering is the execution, Program Management sets the tempo.
Here is how TPMs can help and by no means is this an exhaustive list but a starting point for you to find your own pattern/solutions model:
Disperse strategic time spend in key moments in the development lifecycle to check and re-orient tactical time spend.
Replanning check points.
Heartbeats
Exec Demos & Progress Reviews
Develop a unified planning and development framework and language by which product and engineering come together to decide what to work on.
What is a milestone?
What is a release?
Planning documentation and process
What defines an epic?
How teams collaborate?
Wiki and knowledge
Dashboards and easily accessible schedules and requirements.
Help monitor and adjust the organizations focus so too much time is not spent in one mode while also ensuring that there is a smooth transition between the two modes.
Did we spend enough time for cross-functional teams to digest the strategic roadmap?
How deep did we need to go on that feature discussion?
Have leadership clarified the goals for the upcoming milestones for teams to self-organize?
We spent few weeks developing company OKRs, did the teams get enough time to think through the actionable features supporting the OKRs or was it rushed?
The experienced TPMs will begin to see these patterns like the code in the matrix. It will just make sense to you. Your spidey senses will tingle when the equilibrium is out of whack. For those TPMs still learning the art, think back to all the past events over a project or release cycle and categorize the events (meetings, discussions, formal/informal chats, documentation) into strategic and tactical. Do you see a pattern? Does it match LPO or HPO? Or perhaps something in between?
Easy part is fixing things; hardest part is knowing when and what the problem is.
Until next time 👋!
-Aadil
P.S.
All those embarking on this year’s annual planning season, we salute you.
I recommend, as always, to read everything you can from John Cutler about roadmapping and strategy planning. His post from this week about how to set high-level goals is phenomenal.
How is this week’s newsletter?