Lead with Speed: Fire Up Your Team, Power Your Engines of Development, and Make Your Organization Soar

By Alan Willett

The speed of the business is the speed of the leader. It’s time to up your game. One of the most important questions a leader can ask themselves is: “How do I get my teams, my organization to move faster?”That is the challenge that all leaders face. This challenge grows more intense every day. Lead with Speed is the answer. This problem of speed is often disguised by other symptoms, such as “my projects cannot make an accurate prediction of when they will be done” or the stated need of “my teams need to take more risks.” The real need is not reckless risk-taking that will lead to even more problems and finishing even later. The real need is for speed.An organization can only move as quickly as its leaders. Lead with Speed shows you how to get your ideas, plans, and needs disseminated quickly from the top down. Innovation, or genius, is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. Alan Willett provides a comprehensive guide on how to sweat faster. You will learn how to:Develop the mind-set required for leading with speed•Discern the critical differences between slow and fast projects•Notice what you as a leader need to do to create those differences•Create a targeting system for speed•Get whole groups of people working together to create organizational speed•Lead the exceptional few to be the catalyst for accelerating your organization

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781632657664

Alan Willett

ALAN WILLETT is president of Oxseeker, a leadership development and organizational culture change consultancy whose clients include Oracle, Microsoft, NASA, Intuit, and others.

Book preview

Introduction

LEADERSHIP IS AKIN TO RIDING A roller coaster in the dark. It's high-speed and you don't know what twists and turns are ahead. The key difference is that on this roller coaster you're not along for the ride—you are driving—and the many surprises ahead are coming at you fast.

Speed has always been important. In this global competitive arena, it's not enough to just have good ideas; it's critical to be able to execute those ideas with speed. Those who make it to market with speed, high quality, and, most of all, value do well.

You are never in the market alone. Thus, lagging speed is an engraved invitation to your competition. Lagging speed says to others, Please cut me off in traffic, take my place in line, take that promotion. Please have this market share, that venture funding is yours. It says, I do not need that grant money because we didn't even apply yet.

The speed I am referring to is not a frenzied blur of activity. It is not about quickly delivering something before others that has low value or has problems. This is all about increasing your speed in delivering high-quality value to those who need it. Lagging speed gives away to others the destiny you believed belonged to you. Thus, leading with speed is essential and the ability to accelerate is critical.

This book is not about what products or services to create or even how to select those. This book is about how to increase the speed of your development engine to deliver the best high-quality value to your customers. It's about how to increase the speed of your team, and how to increase the speed of organizations. It's about how to increase your speed of leadership.

This book is organized into four parts of three chapters each. Part One, Exceptional Leaders Own the Accelerator, begins with stories of organizations, projects, and individuals who have mastered the tactics necessary to go faster. It concludes with the mindset underlying the ability to lead with speed. Because the center of speed to creating a valuable delivery is the speed of project development teams, Part Two, Lead Projects with Speed, is written from the point of view of the project leader. It shows how to prepare for projects before they even begin so that they start with speed. It concludes with how to lead projects with speed in spite of all the obstacles they are sure to encounter. Part Three, Lead Organizations with Speed, focuses on the key things a leader can do to remove the sand from the gears and improve the portfolio of projects to include speed. It concludes with the key actions leaders can take to shape their organization so that it has a relentless focus on speed to value. Finally, Part Four, Create a Leadership Force for Speed, details how to knit together exceptional team members so that they drive the whole culture of an organization. It concludes with a detailed case study showing how one leader can change an organization from within.

Buckle up. Let's push on the accelerator and see how fast we can go.

Alan Willett, December 2019

Part One

Exceptional Leaders Own the Accelerator

Immutable Law of Speed #1

You own the accelerator for the speed of your own work and the work of those you lead.

1

Is Your Organization Getting Faster?

A Tale of Two Organizations

"I HAVE TOO MANY WATERMELON PROJECTS, the executive told me with a wave of his arms. I want to be an organization of kiwi projects."

I looked at him with confusion.

He explained. Many of the projects in the organization look like all status indicators are green. But like watermelon, they're just green on the surface. When I look under the surface, they look like rotting, overripe watermelons. Red-light trouble indicators are everywhere. The projects are in trouble. The results often have quality problems, and the teams are slow, and thus late. I want my projects to be like kiwis, not watermelons. I want the indicators to be green all the way through. I want to be a green organization, not a red organization.

This chapter is the story of two organizations, the Red Organization and the Green Organization.

Leaders of projects in these organizations often feel as if they are part of some Tolkien adventure. Like the hobbit Bilbo Baggins, they have to continually overcome trolls, ogres, giant spiders, and more to make it anywhere close to their goal.

This is true for any project that it is important and worth undertaking. This is true because these projects will involve risk. They will have aggressive deadlines. They will have competing priorities.

The projects in both the organizations presented here are beset by the same trolls and ogres that make up the most common project problems. Each organization has a similar set of risks and pressures, but the difference in the results achieved by the two organizations is significant.

In the Red Organization, projects were almost always late. If they were not late, it was because the projects delivered an incomplete set of the expected deliverables. Even worse, those deliverables often had significant problems. The customers felt they had to constantly push to get better quality instead of being able to expect quality products from the organization. As a result, the customers were frequently angry and frustrated. Moreover, all of the team members in the Red Organization felt as if they were slogging through boot-sucking mud to get anything done.

The Green Organization operated in the same industry and was faced with the same challenges. In spite of having to battle the same problems, the projects in the Green Organization had stunningly better results. Their projects were typically on time and contained all the expected content. The quality was superior. The customers were happy. These customers were so pleased they were enthusiastically asking for new content and new features. Team members were proud and happy.

Have you guessed? The Red Organization and the Green Organization are the same set of people.

These organizations have the same leadership, the same project types, and the same project teams. The significant difference, the critical difference that caused the organization to move from Red to Green, is that the leaders changed their mindset about the work. They made significant changes to their methods and to how the work was accomplished. This evolved mindset and improved methodology transformed everything. Speed to value increased as a direct result of modifications to the fundamental processes and procedures.

This chapter is an amalgamation of true stories based on many real teams and many real organizations. Early readers of this chapter often thought that I was looking at their organizations and describing the experiences of their own watermelon projects. The few lucky ones who had already been through the transformation remarked on how the transition from Red to Green was similar to their own organization's metamorphosis. These results can only happen when leadership takes ownership of the accelerator.

A Closer Look at Team X from the Red Organization

Team X was part of the Red Organization. They were responsible for the current top-selling product for their $200-million-per-year organization. There were no new products planned to replace it. Team X was sustaining this product and developing new features to keep the product competitive in the marketplace.

The product had been number one in the marketplace for about ten years. Now, the competition was clearly catching up with the feature set and, in some areas, had surpassed it with competitive new features.

Management felt that Team X was slow. The team agreed. There were many indicators that the team was slow even if you completely ignored the pace of the competition. The following are a few of the symptoms of that slowness:

It felt difficult to add even the simplest of new features. The internal complexity of the system had grown over the last decade, and it took a great deal of experience and knowledge to know where in the system to go to make changes.

When the team made changes, often spooky motion at a distance happened. In other words, when they touched one part of the system, another part, in a completely unrelated area, would break in an unexpected way.

Too much time was spent fixing problems, which left very little time for the exciting work of creating and implementing new ideas.

All of these factors contributed to low morale, which created a negative feedback loop. The energy of team members was low, which made the work feel less fun and take longer. This made it harder to attract new people and new energy to the team, which made it harder to improve things, and led to lower morale.

Many types of teams fit this profile. Some of them are product development teams in high-tech companies. Some of them are teams responsible for creating new services or new marketing in nonprofit organizations. In some of those organizations, the processes that define how to do the work are so fragile that it is a challenge to get anything done.

The fact is that the symptoms of Team X are very similar across many teams in many organizations, not just the Red Organization in this chapter.

Team X struggled. They felt trapped. So did the executives. The customers also sometimes felt trapped by their investment in a product that was not continuing to meet all of their needs. Customers considered fleeing to other vendors. Some customers broke off the struggling long-term relationship and ventured out to seek other products. The project team needed a significant change.

Context Matters

Before we tackle that Team X transformation, it is essential to look at the context that surrounds Team X. Team X is part of the Red Organization. This context matters. The question to ask is whether Team X is an anomaly or part of a larger problem.

The Red Organization senior executive had a list of complaints about the projects in her organization. She was responsible for about one thousand people with multiple development projects running. Her analysis: I don't know which projects will finish on time. I take that back. From what I have seen, none will finish on time with all the content promised, and with high quality. If they do finish ‘on time,’ the product will lack key features, and it is likely that it won't work the first time we use it. So my problem is that I actually can't predict exactly when the projects will finish or what features they will have. Further, it is amazing to me how many people are dedicated to integrating and testing the products. The testing organization is close to overshadowing the number of people actually creating features. In spite of all that testing, our customers are still finding problems!

I waited for a few moments and asked, Is that all?

No, she replied. There's one more thing. Too many of the projects are ultimately canceled before we get them out the door. There is so much wasted money and, even worse, so much wasted potential.

It's clear that the answer to our question is that Team X is not an anomaly. Their performance reflects how projects work across the whole organization.

The Commitment to Improve

The first step in getting faster is to decide to commit to the effort and the investment that is required to improve speed to value. Trying harder is not enough. To get faster, you must do something differently. You often need to do many things differently. Moreover, most teams and organizations do not know how to judge how fast they are currently going. This means that the initial action needed when making a commitment to improve speed is to measure your current speed and compare that to the speed you want to go.

It's acceptable to start with a subjective measure. In other words, start by asking leadership and team members, How do you feel about your speed? Making this visual is very useful. I have done this with a simple picture on a whiteboard. I drew a horizontal line and wrote the word Fast. A few inches below that line, I drew a parallel line and wrote the word Slow. Then I asked, Where is the team speed now? Which direction is it heading?

In the Red Organization, and especially on Team X, the picture looked like Figure 1.1 on the next page.

Figure 1.1. Simple pictures like this help people represent the most important points quickly and clearly. The team was getting slower.

The arrow people drew was much closer to the slow line than the fast line. They drew the arrow pointing down. The clear indicator was that they felt they were getting slower.

The people on Team X explained they had quality issues with multiple features and that these issues were preventing work on adding new items. Note that this measure is not based on solid metrics, but on the team members' feelings. There was strong consensus among all team members and leadership.

Solid metrics are helpful, but do not let the lack of precise metrics prevent you from making a feelings-based assessment. The first step is to decide that the current speed is unacceptable and to decide to invest in getting faster. This is how Team X started their improvement. With the team clear on the problem and committed to improvement, management agreed to invest in helping the team increase their speed.

The Transformation of Team X

The leadership team of Team X made the investment to do many things differently. The following are the major types of changes Team X made under robust and consistent leadership:

They decided to improve.

They went beyond emotion-based judgment of their speed and actually measured how fast they were going.

They worked to understand the barriers to speed.

They reviewed the tools they were using as a group and updated those that would help them go faster.

They characterized their detailed work processes and updated many of them to be much more effective for the whole of the product development life cycle.

They replaced the most complex and fragile parts of their software system with a much better designed and implemented code base.

The speed improvement effort required a significant investment from the organization. In return, it allowed this team to become faster, and to be able to produce a much higher quality, higher value product. Team X achieved the rewards of speed to value.

Customers were excited about the new product. They said, This was well worth the wait. The product performance is faster. We get new features at a much faster pace. Even the support people seem happier when we call for help.

Feature changes in the new system took less than a day. Previously, a feature change made in the old system with the old processes, old tools, and old mindset had taken about three weeks to implement.

The team measured a consistent fifteen-fold speed increase. Implementing a system to measure their speed meant that the team had access to data that demonstrated the improvement brought about by the new system and new way of doing development.

The joy factor within the team was greatly improved. One team member summed it up: It seemed I was working in a dank, dark cave and I have now been freed to work on a beach in the tropics.

Making these improvements was a tough challenge for the team. Nevertheless, they thrived in the environment of positive change. It is important to note that when leadership challenged them to invest in themselves, they were also given the freedom to improve. That freedom fed their excitement to work in the organization.

Even better, they now know they can get faster. The team has many ideas they are planning to implement to generate additional speed. Management was also thrilled that Team X became a Green project, or as my one senior leader would say, a delightful kiwi project.

The Transformation of the Red Organization

As the leader of individual project teams, you have an obligation to improve the team you are leading and to be successful with the project you are leading. The leader of Team X was successful at that transformation. However, individual project teams are often short-lived in organizations. Improving a project team, even as dramatically as the example with Team X, will not have a lasting impact on the overall organization unless organizational leadership acts to make this the new standard.

The overall organizational leader must create an organizational culture where all project teams are working at going faster, where the projects are much more like kiwis than the metaphorical watermelons. The transformation of a Red organization to a Green organization often starts with a single project. It is up to the leader to continue that transformation across the whole of the organization.

The Red Organization accomplished this transformation. These are the types of changes the Red Organization made to improve productivity and speed:

Leadership decided to invest in improvement.

They focused on transforming a critical few projects to high performers before spreading the new approach to everyone.

They brought in proven external experts to do focused work with the first projects targeted for improvement.

They moved from emotion-based statements about project status to assessments based on data and judgment.

They created an organizational culture of improving project speed and quality.

Measuring Improvement

Many organizations I have worked with have been successful at the transformation from Red to Green. The following are some of the indicators of successful transformations.

Improved On-Time, On-Budget Project Completion

Over the years, I have often faced large conference rooms filled with executives of large product development organizations. I have asked a simple opening question: What percentage of your projects finish on time, or early, with the required content, and with high-quality results delivered to your customers? The answer almost every time is 10 percent or less.

The Standish Group periodically does a much broader survey than my informal surveys. Their Chaos Reports also show that only a small percentage of projects are considered, in their language, fully successful. They show a range over the years of about 10 percent to 40 percent as successful, depending on the size of the project and methodologies used. This data reveals that there are far too many Red organizations with many watermelon projects.

There are a handful of organizations I have worked with that are exceptions to this poor performance. They did the work to become Green organizations. These organizations have detailed data for all their projects that show over time that they are improving in predictability and quality. One organization reported that of the twenty significant projects they completed in that time frame, 80 percent finished early or on time:

Eight finished ahead of schedule by 10 to 30 percent.

Eight finished on time.

Four finished late by about 10 to 20 percent—and they knew that this would be the case ahead of time and were able to negotiate changes to the schedule and content.

Note that these organizations improved predictability. That is good, but it is not enough. To compete, the organization must also be faster. These Green organizations have also dramatically improved their ability to create a quality result faster.

Reduced the Amount of Time Lost to Rework

Before the organization did their many improvements, the cost of rework was often over 50 percent of the entire project cost. Many projects actually had costs as high as 80 percent of the time lost to dealing with problems, especially customer problems.

After they implemented the improvements, all of the projects greatly reduced the amount of rework. Driving down the time lost to rework to amazingly low numbers greatly increased the projects' speed.

Reduced Project Cancellations

One of the biggest complaints of many Red organizations is that they have some wholly failed or even canceled projects. One organization I worked with reported that before improvement, they could characterize