The Baking Manifesto Part II

In my previous post, I introduced the Baking Manifesto - a set of 4 values inspired by the Agile Manifesto and, yes, baking. I briefly covered the first value "Collaboration and creativity over silos and cookie-cutting". Now for the second value...

Trust and a light touch over frequent temperature checks and thorough mixing

A well-known principle of baking is to not open the oven door too many times while your cake is baking. Doing so will cause the temperature to vary, and the cake will not rise evenly. Slamming the oven door after checking the cake is the ultimate "don't" - air will escape from the batter and your beautiful chocolate sponge or tangy moist lemon cake will implode to form a crater you could lose a Mars rover in.

The same goes for programs. If you're running a large program, there will most likely be a number of project managers managing parts of the program and reporting status, risks & issues to you. Let's assume you have a couple of senior-level project managers and one or two newbies. You could spend all of your time taking the temperature of each project - especially those run by the newbies - throughout the program, so you don't have to worry about someone taking a wrong step and jeopardising the program. You could go around slamming oven doors and rattling pans when you're not happy with progress, but that definitely won't have any sustainable positive effects on team morale or the status of the program.

Instead, try setting up some guidelines for everyone at the start of the program - including example reports, registers, etc - then gather the project managers together for regular status sharing sessions. You're trying to be agile, so there shouldn't be a huge stack of documents to wade through each meeting. Each project manager should be presenting a brief synopsis of their project - actual status compared with planned; the top 3 - 5 risks and issues; mitigation plans; and any other relevant news.

Trust your project managers to own their parts of the program and do a great job. A little bit of competitiveness is a common trait in good project managers, and they will rise to the challenge. Their job is to know a lot more than you about the details of each project. Coach the newbies during the early phases of the program, then step back a bit and let them test their wings. They will learn from what the seniors present and discuss, and you can apply a light guiding touch to both newbies and seniors as needed throughout the program. Of course, if you have an underperforming project manager, you'll need to step in and provide a greater level of mentoring (or more) to get them back on track - a topic for another day. But if your organisation is hiring the right talent, even the most junior project managers will quickly learn from their own mistakes, develop their own unique style and approach, and evolve into competent, experienced project managers before your eyes.

Overmixing is another baking "don't". It's tempting to keep on stirring until there are no more lumps, but that just makes for tough muffins. In the same way, keep your program meetings to a minimum, in terms of both participants and frequency. If you have a distributed team, it makes sense to get everyone together for a regular videoconference, so they can have some valuable face-to-virtual-face time. But if your teams are colocated, you should be able to get by with just the project managers attending the meetings, and maybe a senior tech lead or architect. Choose the frequency of the status meeting in accordance with the expected duration of the program. If it's a 12-month (or longer) program, every two or four weeks is a good frequency for status meetings. If it's a 3-month program, weekly meetings make sense.

Obviously you can't step so far back that the program goes off the rails. I tend to take ad-hoc deeper dives with individual project managers in between the main status meetings, especially if I'm concerned about a particular area. Or I'll set up quick weekly checkpoints for the high-risk or critical-path projects, to help identify and remove obstacles.

Trusting in your team and keeping your touch light will not only help your project managers own their projects and manage them with confidence; it will leave you more time to do the program management work you need to be doing - such as assessing the strategic value of your programs; keeping your stakeholders informed and engaged; and co-ordinating the dependencies between projects.