It is a pleasure to be here today. Thank you very much for joining my session. Um My name is Roxana Dario and I will be your host today on the topic of deliverability. A story about uh people to understand why this um topic is close to my heart.Um I would like to share with you a couple of um minutes of information about uh where I'm coming from and why this is a topic. I it's clo that's close to my heart. I've been in the technology world for the past 25 years and um I've been uh working uh with uh teams in product management, developing software. I worked in it services. I transformed organizations and scaled up products. Um I've been working as a coach for sustainable performance, uh consultant in digital transformation. And my passion is to help organizations become a I ready. And when I say organizations that means people becoming a I ready. I'm a, a part of this presentation. I'm also a uh woman tech global ambassador and it is my joy to, to share this with the world at the product school services. We are um we have um a wealth of experience uh through our consultants network that have contributed to designing uh over 1000 processes. Over time with a passion for aligning the business vision with the people. We have designed um activities with the concept of decision by design, where we supported start ups and transform through digital adoption, multinational companies and also supported companies to scale up.

We always apply a hands on experience in the projects uh of um hands on experience in concepts like design thinking, systems thinking, and probabilistic thinking and supporting all our um projects are um services in coaching and we look to design coaching programs that are appropriate for the type of uh companies um uh you run.

So why is this important and close to my heart to talk about deliverability, deliverability is a journey that um uh it services companies are undertaking with every single thing they operate on everything. It's a project when you talk about it services. So if that's a a project and we look at the ability to deliver, you know, the word deliverability comes very handy. But why, why is it important over time in uh various projects I've been working on? Um We, we've, I've come across situations where everything we set ourselves to work towards could not be delivered. And this is reflected very clearly in how the market is actually progressing in terms of it. Services recently in um April this year, research and markets um Analyst group has published a forecast for um the it services market growth reaching $1123 billion by 2026. Interestingly enough, this is a ver very nice number. We can all be um looking happy uh towards the future of it services. But um if we are looking at um a separate report coming from PM I the project management uh organization where everybody is looking up to in terms of project uh methodologies and uh what else is going on in the project world?

About a quarter of it, services projects lack clarity and the uh of the goals and the purpose. That's a very high number um to, to not have clarity. What's your, what's the direction you are going towards then to um top up this um terrible number, we look at um 26 to 38% failure rate in it projects um implementation. Now, to me that's a number that if I take 26 to 30% out of $1123 billion we look at the range between 304 $100 billion of losses. Something is not quite right there and I felt it through my career and it's not about experimenting, it's about actually something not going quite right. That prompted me to start asking how can I make this better? Um Is it something that can be done in order for us to change? Uh the lack of performance or sustainable performance when delivering it services projects. So when, when I I posed myself this question, I looked at a typical plan where we define a scope, a timeline, a budget and we organize those boxes in an order that we calculate to uh give us the results we want even though about 25% of the results are not quite sure from the definition of BM I.

But when we start applying those plans in, in real life, we actually see a different picture. The order of the things that we calculated doesn't really match the reality because the reality is actually driven by the people interactions. We are very good at putting tasks in an order, but we are not very good at assessing how people interact around those tasks. So to me, this is a hot topic. Um it's, it's um the reason for uh starting looking at deliverability is another way of understanding how to deliver it services projects. Um The first question I asked myself um linked to the lack of having clarity of objectives and goals was what is the purpose when you kick off an it project, the purpose is typically greater than the next task in hand. So if we, if we only look at the next task, we we lose the sight of what's the bigger picture that has to be coming in clearly and everybody to understand when working together. Now, if that's the purpose and the purpose is uh not black and white, but it's a full, full color screen. Um The next question is what does it mean to create sustainable deliverability when many people interact with each other along the timeline of a project delivery?

This being the questions and me being a biochemist scientist by education, I designed myself an interaction experiment to help me on the path of understanding how to manage deliverability. So I started with the observation I researched a little bit uh around the hypothesis. I've um made I tested and analyzed the information. So my observation was that people interactions are an integral part of how a project is delivered. When I define the hypothesis by monitoring a set of parameters around the interactions of people help me identify if there are any patterns that contribute to the ability to deliver. Then I research materials from various sciences. I focus specifically on uh biological systems, ecosystems, biochemistry, uh being close to my heart, uh psychology, Neurosciences, physics, philosophy. And I also consider various mathematical models that would drive um the um the way I looked at the analysis of my information, I tested the hypothesis adjusted the parameters on the way and retested, calibrated, optimized all all the aspects that will help me understand if I actually have a model or not.

So um that, that um information was analyzed observed over several years of interactions and contributions in various projects in it services and software development, um Some multiple projects, multiple observations, different teams, different environments and the same conclusion, I could make simple be easy hooray, right.

So along the way I experimented with some visuals that will help me understand the interactions um in a team, everybody part of a team. It's a player, obviously because the team um is made of players, um each player can impact the sum of all players interactions. Now, when I looked at the knowledge um in my graph, there, there are a bunch of lines on the right side and a bunch of lines on the um a green um lines on the left side of the table that showed me the transfer of information or available knowledge between different players in the team.

Um We followed a fairly standard um in, in that project, we followed a fairly standard analysis of the requirement and how people would interact around the specific requirement that we needed to work together on. Uh it become interested at that point to actually um start monitoring.

What is the mood of the team. So for that, I drew some flowers and some are sad, some are happy, but the three colors they represent the mood in the team in in terms of interactions between people where we had some nasty interactions, some dreadful ones and some open ones. And that gave me another idea that um there are many interplay in our game of the project. Um And each player contributes in a different way to a different interplay. So if we are um to evaluate the requirement was a type of interplay. If we are evaluate, if we are um doing a daily stand up meeting was a different kind of interplay, then we uh looked at collaboration um between different people in different roles. And as it happens in it, services people will have multiple roles at the same time. But um through the observation of collaboration, there was no clear differentiation between what role someone will play at a certain moment. There was no clarity and that entangles um and blocks the flow of information between people. Therefore, the interactions become, become difficult.

So for each interplay, you get closer or farther away from the purpose depending on the interaction itself. Now, these were my doodles as a result of me doodling, I started observing patterns and I started observing how these patterns could be um translated. And um I disentangled interactions.

Um The solution almost revealed itself to me and each parameter can be measured independently. Moreover each parameter, not only it can be measured, but it can be self measured. So that means bringing people together. Now, I applied this model uh with disentangled parameters in life projects over the years. And um here I have an example of a team that was formed by uh three Scrum teams, about 20 people in total three product owners, one UX designer, two consultants and they had the common purpose to create a specific value for the customer base. That value was um fixed in time and we organized our work in nine sprints over three months, one deadline, very standard um approach with people being very familiar with, with such um uh models now where we started from, we were at the point where we said we can't, we can hardly do it over time.

When we looked at monitoring our ability to deliver together, it became a game of the team. So it took, it took maybe a 3 to 5 days out of the three month's time to get used to the model. We used one of the ceremonies in agile methodologies to run a daily stand up. And for those who are not familiar with the concept, the daily stand up, it's a meeting where people come together and tell the status of where they are. And if they have any blockers, part of that, we added on, on our daily interaction to self score ourselves, uh how close we are to our um deliverability targets, the green horizontal line there shows the target we wanted to achieve. So when we self scoring ourselves, we get the calculation from the mathematical models behind and it takes us closer or farther away from the point of being able to deliver, we started on a red path. Um We climbed up on the orange one where we maybe could deliver it, deliver together and we had some ups and downs there. Um But uh getting towards the end of the overall plan, we climbed climb climb and we were very confident we could deliver up to a point where we've come across uh a misunderstanding of our requirements and we actually had to go back uh to fix it.

And then we climbed again towards the path of deliverability. What helped uh what was the great help for us in monitoring our daily deliverability as a team was that immediately it reduced the amount of conflict and blame. You did this. No, you did that. You said this. No, you said that. You said it's gonna take this time. No, you said that time, but I didn't put in that time, my time for learning. So all all those misunderstandings conflicts, misinterpretations have been almost eliminated. Another part that was almost eliminated was um the losses.

We, if we were to stay on a path that we can hardly do it, we would have never delivered. But the, the moment we have actually seen that together, we can see uh the solution from a different point of view, it help us move forward now translating the um activities uh I captured in my notes over the years into a tool has been an exercise of joy and fun. And um we have created this coaching tool for deliverability and not only deliverability where you can have views of what is the overall state of the team or an organization or an entire department. Uh You can look at multiple ways people link with each other in the interactions.

We have multiple interlinks. One of them is deliverability and we also can look at the trend uh and what impacts that trend in, in how people interact. The beauty of it is that it's um a self scoring exercise and there is no, no one else to look at um except for yourself. And that um when you look at yourself and you come and give yourself a lower score on the day. Um One of the things we found fascinating was that uh people started understanding each other much better and uh that helped create uh empathy with each other. And it uh created um a, a great movement within the team to try to help each other. It was unexpected but very well received and it repeated itself with every team. We tested this um uh tool. So it minimized the blame game people seen where the others are struggling and stepped in to help. And it created a high level of empathy between team members for the situation they found themselves in. And if you want to deliver together and you understand the common purpose, it's so much easier to actually see where you are. Now. Um If we are looking at the problem, we are trying to solve and that meaning minimizing the losses, it's nice to look at the growth. But how do you deal with the loss?

We believe that um taking uh everything that the standard product methodology brings um on the table that you look, you need to organize yourself to have a budget, to have a scope to have your timeline calculated and all that it's completely valid. But to that we actually add the people interactions without that, there is no project, you can't have projects without the people. So the people need to understand the purpose they are working towards, they need to be specific in the objectives they want to achieve and then they work together for on tasks and um come together to find solutions to stay on budget. We believe that uh a tool like this helps um teams and organizations actually become uh more efficient and not only but um a very interesting side effect was it o of it was um the ability to increase the well being at work besides deliverability, which had the business, immediate business benefit.

We observed that um a degree of happiness and the sense of accomplishment while working together was a great contributor towards the well being at work. The quality of interactions. When people agree to work together towards a common purpose, the quality of those interactions increased.

And um we've seen fewer and fewer conflicts, uh misunderstandings and blame game. It's never pleasant to say, oh, you, you didn't give that information to me or you didn't do things on time, it's very easy. It's much more difficult to actually um understand what happened behind.

And with our tool, now, we can discover one every step of the way how you can deliver together. When you have a common purpose. You heard me saying purpose several times that is uh the the core ingredient to be able to use deliverability playing together brings new levels in decision making. Uh because you can continuously observe adapt and um understand how people interact to deliver the same uh purpose.

Now, this is where we are today in terms of our concept for deliverability. Um And I would be happy to share more with you if uh you wanna book um an exploratory conversation. Uh Please feel free to come to our website www the product schools.com or email us on Hello at the product schools.com. You find me on linkedin. I put the link to my profile in the chat version, chat uh uh box on the right side of the screen and uh let's spend a few minutes together. Thank you very much. I look forward to hearing from you.