Weeknote 12th July 2024

A bit about measuring value in an agile way and - oh no - some UK politics

Reporting for projects, changes and improvements is frustrating for everyone at the moment. Over the last couple of months I have been trying to make it a bit less so. For some stakeholders it is difficult to get a clear picture of what is going on through reports. For others it is frustrating to put so much effort into reporting with very little visible return. I’m hoping that adopting a lean and agile mind set can help. Some examples of this are:

• Accepting that reporting is only one half of a management control system. The other half is the action which is informed by the reports. At the moment our reports are quite generic but the actions available to us are pretty limited. A lot of effort on reporting goes to waste as we are gathering information that can’t make a practical difference. We should be able to flip this around and start with what the feasible actions are and gather just enough information to make a well-informed choice.
• Getting smarter about risk management which includes taking well-informed, calculated risks rather than always seeking perfect information.
• Exploring what we can learn from the information teams generate as a side-effect of doing their work - effectively free reporting.
• Testing approaches at a small, cheap scale such as a prototype dashboard that is able to show the information we already have in new ways. We are using the prototype to answer conventional questions (which projects are being blocked) and also try out some new ones (what is the overall flow efficiency and potential impact of our whole portfolio).
• Creating new opportunities for action such as adjusting capacity or changing our risk profile rather than just rationing which work gets done first.

Probably the most important aspect is recognising the social and emotional aspects of reporting, deciding and taking action. This isn’t like reading a dial on a machine. Reports come from people and are filled with opinions, assessments, assumptions and interpretations. The quality and accuracy of the reports is influenced by things like experience, motivation, incentives, trust and self-confidence. Ignoring this context is a recipe for continued frustration.

Warning: A bit about UK politics

The recent UK election got me thinking back to the EU membership referendum in 2016. Back then I didn’t know if things would be better for the UK inside or outside the EU. That wasn’t the biggest issue for me. The biggest issue was the cost and effort of making a change and that clearly outweighed even the most optimistic forecasts of the benefits of leaving.

In contrast the cost of switching between our major policitcal parties is pretty small. A batch of new MPs are currently trying to find their way around the Houses of Parliament but your public services are still working today pretty much just as they were a couple of weeks ago and still will be in a few months time. In some ways you can argue that the election isn’t that important and around 40% of the voting age population decided it wasn’t worth making their views known this time.

I don’t know which centre-left or centre-right party is best for the UK in the long run but, once again, there was a bigger issue for me. Our present political system depends upon holding several things in balance. An example, is balancing being liked by 30% or more of the population and tollerated by another 30% whilst taking the necessarily unpopular decisions needed to keep the country working. Even to get to this point any politician hoping to have a chance of getting into power needs to balance sticking to the party line and speaking up for what they think is right. This is incredibly (impossibly?) hard and I am not kidding myself that I could do it. It seems to get harder after a couple of terms in power. My big issue was that we had lost balance several years ago and we needed a clear change to have any chance of getting it back.

Unfortunately, we haven’t got it yet. Getting back into balance will require lots of humility and pragmatism from the incoming Labour team and it will need an effective opposition. Right now that is the Conservatives but they won’t have long to re-energise and we will have to see if they learn the right lessons from the last few years. A different voting system would make this a lot easier to achieve but I can’t see that happening in my life-time. Let’s send all of the main parties our good wishes for the next couple of years. If they are all doing well then maybe they can concentrate on what the country needs rather than opinion polls and sound bites.