If you do not already have an Epic Axis, this meeting should be dedicated to it. Since people already understand what an Epic is and have discussed much of the work, one meeting should be enough to complete the Epic Axis. If you have time left, it is better to wrap up the meeting and not discuss new topics.
If you already have an Epic Axis, the second meeting will be about responsibility.
There is no responsibility in Agile. As Vladimir Tarasov says, ‘Two soldiers are sent to fetch brushwood, one is put in charge’. Classical PM says that a responsible person should be assigned to even a small task and put it in the responsibility matrix. Agile does not use the word ‘responsibility’ anywhere except in ‘the whole team is responsible for everything’. Which is equivalent to saying that no one is responsible for anything.
We consider abdicating responsibility to be a mistake in Agile, an unbalanced 'green' solution. In our work, we place responsibility in Epic. The Epic Owner is the person responsible for closing the epic. Fixing responsibility for stories is too small, making people responsible for objectives is too large. The epic is, from our perspective, the best element for which people can be held accountable.
Task Structure. We will appeal to the classic definition of task structure several times in the TDF, and the Responsibility Grades Framework will be built on it.
Ask your team: ‘A kettle costs $100. Its price was raised by 10%, then it was lowered by 10%. How much does the kettle cost now?’ If you already understand the basic rules for working with your team, you will write the conditions on the board.
The only correct answer is $99. But instead of it, people can give such answers as: ‘1 percent less’, ‘$10 less’ or, worst of all: ‘I do not know’. The answer ‘$99’ shows that a person cares about the convenience of his colleagues and brings a finished, not an intermediate result.
Structure of the Task:
- R – Resources. Resources are what the team has. In the task, resources are three statements: 1) ‘a kettle costs $100’, 2) ‘the price of the kettle was first reduced by 10%’, 3) ‘then the price of the kettle was increased by 10%’.
- P – Purpose. Purpose is what is to be achieved. In this case, to answer how much the kettle now costs. This may be necessary so that the shop employee can change the price tag.
- T – Tools. Tools that help a person to convert R to P. Here it is the ability to work with percentages and arithmetic.
Responsibility Grades:Specialist. This is a person to whom you can give resources, explain what needs to be done and how to do it, and the person will do everything accurately and, if they encounter difficulties, will come back to you and ask. People like that are very valuable. Most people are below that level.
Have you ever had such situations where you gave a person all the resources on Monday, explained what needs to be done, showed examples, gave instructions, encouraged them to write to you if something is unclear, told them that the deadline is Friday at 4 PM. And on Friday at 4 PM you get a job that looks like it was done in the last 15 minutes? And you then have to redo it all at home on Saturday?
There are people – an awful lot of them – who need to be micromanaged rather than developed, or you will not get any results at all. If you have people on your team who do not reach Specialist level – remove them from your team.
If you have a person at the Specialist level, you should invite them to the team only if they are active and ambitious. Otherwise, you should manage them through C&C.
TeammateThis is a person who, given resources and a goal, can figure out how to achieve the goal by themselves: they do not need instructions and micromanagement. With the right effort, such a person can develop and become an Epic Owner.
Epic OwnerThis is a person who is responsible for an epic that they have formulated. An Epic Owner is a person who, with knowledge of the project's purpose, can formulate the small project needed to close the main project. The Epic Owner gets the resources, sets the objective themselves, and determines the path to achieve it.
Team LeadTeam Lead is the person who has the ultimatum responsibility for the success of the project, including bringing in the necessary resources to close the project. This is you. If there are other people on your team at this level of responsibility, you are lucky. Appreciate them.
What to do?- Conduct a kettle price experiment.
- Present the framework to your colleagues.
- Set expectations: an Epic Owner is someone who is at the Epic Owner level. They are even named the same.
- This framework is exactly what the team is given, it is not worth discussing unless the team sees its obvious inapplicability to your case. In that case, discuss and change it, but always keep in focus that this is a framework about responsibility, not about position or professionalism.
We at Kite worked mostly with management teams that included the leaders of the respective teams. Such people were at least at the Epic Owner level, which resulted in all epics on the team being covered by someone on the team.
The opposite case is the intern team. In this case, you are responsible for all epics.
A good case is when you have a few responsible people you can rely on and who together with you can take responsibility for all epics in the project.
If there is a recommendation for sharing responsibility, it is this: give people the opportunity to take responsibility, and if they are not capable of taking responsibility, take it away. A framework on how to take responsibility and not lose a team member will be presented at Phase II.
Deliverables: Every Epic has a responsible person.