Quality Improvement Workshop (run by a Quality Coach)

Finding and fixing gaps in quality

A quality coach helps teams discover & fill gaps that impact quality. Call this quality improvement if you like. The focus is less on product quality and more on anything that prevents a team from achieving its engineering objectives that should align with its company-wide strategy.

Over time, I've developed ways in which to help teams identify what their gaps are and work towards building the start of a roadmap to help fix that gap. I use a grassroots bottom-up approach as it offers a team an element of autonomy in what they choose to focus on. The emphasis is on experimentation through performing small achievable tasks that uncover a greater understanding of the nature of the problem ahead of us. This approach allows us to pivot our strategy based on what we learn, reducing the impact of opportunity cost.

Not every company will be willing to sit with this level of ambiguity and may wish greater clarity on your plan to close the gap. A blend of top-down/bottom-up approaches may suit you better. Work with them on that.

The rest of this blog post outlines the workshop and provides some downloadable questions and a miro template to use if you wish to run one.

Quality Coach Sailboat Workshop

Purpose of the Workshop
The engineering quality workshop is used to identify three achievable team tasks that align with your company engineering objectives.

Output
By the end of the workshop, the team will have three small and achievable tasks that can be placed on the team's backlog. Each task will have an owner and an agreed timeframe by which the owner agrees to feedback on progress and learning.

Sailboat analogy

The quality coach sailboat workshop uses the common sailboat retrospective format but with a twist. This time, the workshop is used to scope work instead of reflecting on work.

A massive shoutout to Abby Bangser who as it turns out, also used the sailboat retrospective in this way and who sharpened this whole workshop into what you see today.

The rest of this blog describes the workshop in detail and provides downloads for you to use for your own workshop.

There are five elements: the island, the wind, the rocks, the anchor and of course, the island. Here's what these elements mean:

Island: The island outlines your engineering objectives. That is what your CTO/Head of Engineering care about and probably what they're being measured on. For example, shipping value rapidly to customers. I'm calling these engineering objectives.

Anchor: The anchor is what is dragging the team down and preventing us from reaching the island. For example, our monolith prevents us from shipping value early as we have to wait for everything to be done before we can test.

Wind: The wind is an idea of how we can overcome the anchors. An example could be access to a new capability, such as test coverage.

Rocks: Risks that could potentially trip us up. For example, a rock could be lack of alignment across the org could lead to frustration in prioritisation.

Boat: The tasks the team could begin doing that will work towards either removing rocks or implementing one of the wind ideas.

Engineering objectives

It's possible to perform this workshop without speaking to your CTO or knowing your company engineering objectives. As a side note, if you, your team or your engineering department doesn't have clarity on its engineering/product goals, methinks you're gonna need a bigger boat.

Knowing engineering objectives allows you to frame your tasks in terms of how it supports engineering and your CTO. This can be useful if the team ends up needing to ask for an additional budget to support this work.

Typical CTO/Engineering objectives can be:

• Ability to release code at speed
• Release with confidence
• Shipping value rapidly to customers
• Shorten iteration and improvement cycles
• Lowering incidents and defects

With that knowledge, let's jump into how to prepare and run this remote-first workshop.

Quality Coach Sailboat Workshop Preparation

Begin your preparations well in advance. A minimum of two weeks if you can.

Who should attend: the whole team, including designers, engineers, tech leads, delivery leads & product owners.

Preparation Steps:

• Research your engineering objectives. Extra points if you can get them prioritised. You could, if you choose, select one objective only and narrow the discussion to that.
• Share material with the team on this topic. For instance, share the engineering objectives. You could also help expand the team's concept of quality beyond product quality. I like to share Martin Fowler's article on internal quality.
• Talk to delivery leads and tech leads. Would this workshop be something of value to the team? Is it a good time to run such an exercise? Getting buy-in from tech leads and delivery leads means that the workshop outcomes are more likely to be acted on.
• Create an online board based on the quality sailboat workshop in Miro and share this link in the invite.
• Work through your timings and the questions you want to ask.
  The questions you ask frame the discussion so think carefully what you want to ask. See my timing breakdown for structure and question suggestions.

• Setup a zoom calendar invite for a 120-minute workshop.
  In the description, explain the workshop's purpose, what the output will be, how the workshop will benefit them and the agenda.
• Organise a facilitator to take notes allowing you to observe and participate if required. You could have a slack back channel to converse on.

You may be curious why this workshop involves so much preparation. It's because quality coaching work falls into the change management bucket. It requires taking people along a journey in order to be able to absorb the change. Workshop preparation goes to help explain the why and the personal benefits. The change management model ADKAR is useful to consider when performing any type of quality coaching work.

Quality Coach Sailboat Workshop Instructions:

1. Icebreaker: Remote workshops really benefit from icebreakers. Choose one of your favourites or select from this list.
2. Explain the sailboat metaphor (see above) and share your miro (or similar) board.
3. Island: Introduce the engineering objectives that your company has.
   Spend time asking questions and discussing these objectives. Possible questions could be:
   - Are there any questions or concerns about the objectives?
   - Are there objectives that are missing?
   - Are these objectives too far-fetched?
   - What is your measure of success?
   - Which objectives do you think you are close to achieving?
   - What areas of your work do you think to relate to each objective?
4. Anchor: Next up, work through the anchor element.
   Ask them to outline what's stopping them from achieving these engineering objectives. Questions such as:
   - What is the biggest cause of defects/incidents in the team?
   - When has fear stopped or slowed you down while making changes recently?
   - Are there areas in which you feel only one or a few people can work?
   - What ongoing maintenance tasks are in your schedule, whether daily, weekly, monthly or more?
   - What examples of interrupted work have occurred in the last week?
   - Are there any trends in this type of work?
   - What would become anchors if we were to double the size of the team? Or double our customers?
5. Wind: Wind stands for the big or small ideas that are going to help us overcome our anchors. Encourage brainstorming & divergent thinking. Suspend judgement on the suitability of the ideas.
   The following questions might be handy:
   - What are some big or small ideas for overcoming the anchors?
   - If you could rewrite or re-architect something, what would make the biggest impact?
   - What would you like to automate to reduce ongoing maintenance?
   - What new process or tool would you introduce to make your changes safer?
   - What new process or tool would you introduce to meet the objectives laid out?
6. Rocks: Finally, ask them what risks might impede their achieving these activities. You could ask something like:
   - What is stopping us from implementing those improvements tomorrow?
   - Are there alignment issues with different departments?
   - Is there a tool that hasn't been able to get through procurement?
   - Do you want or need more leadership support?
   - Are there staffing gaps?
7. It's time to build the boat.
   Ask the team to list possible tasks they could do to move the dial on these goals. Encourage small actionable steps. Here are some sample questions:
   - From all those ideas, what 3 tasks will you take back to your team and implement?
   - Are there any "wind" ideas that you can spike/implement?
   - What rocks can you break up by kicking off a conversation?
8. Voting Time: If there are a lot of tasks, ask each team member to vote for their 3 preferred tasks based on the information they have on the miro board. Ask for an owner. Seek agreement from the team on when to meet again to discuss progress.

That's pretty much it in terms of running the workshop. Here are some tips I've learned along the way. There are no hard or fast rules here. Keep in mind that you're playing a long game and that the team owns quality (not you).

Tips on the workshop

1) Allow time for reflection and discussion. Some teams may not have discussed their work as a team in terms of your CTO objectives.

2) If people don't speak up, don't push it. Some teams naturally prefer to reflect on topics later. Always provide the option to write as opposed to speak. End any workshop with an open invitation to reach out and chat.

3) If people are unwilling to take ownership of tasks, close the workshop, thanking people for their time. Again make it clear you are available for further discussion if they would like it.

4) Sometimes, you just have to wait for the right time. If teams are under pressure to deliver product features, as much as they may want to improve things, little will get absorbed if there's no headspace for new thinking.

And that's it. The quality coach sailboat workshop. You're free to download and distribute content, but please ensure your attributes are appropriate.

Happy learning!

Quality Sailboat Workshop © 2022 by Anne-Marie Charrett & Abby Bangser is licensed underAttribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International