Play 6

Continuous Product Improvement

In this play, a team is responsible for the continuous cycle of product enhancement and ongoing support, based on incorporating user feedback and operational metrics provided by monitoring. Continuous product improvement is a critical aspect of product management; it is aimed at improving work practices that focus on customer value adding tasks and minimizing non-value (defect remediation, partially done work, unnecessary features) activities.

The work undertaken to this point offers insights and metrics that should be reviewed and actioned as part of the overall improvement and change management processes.

Ensure that team ownership (originally defined in Play 2) has been reviewed and reaffirmed.

• Is it within the product business unit?
• Has it been delegated to the IMB (through an agreement)?
• Has it been outsourced to an independent services organization?
• Has an Application/Product Manager role been defined?
• Who is providing the Business Analyst (BA) services? Are the IMB BA’s involved?

Step 1: Incorporate Feedback

• Conduct a product usability analysis at least twice a year:
  • Defer to a product usability expert to run workshops
  • Aim for incremental deliverables; identify the features users want (unnecessary features result in partially done work)
  • Review and obtain metrics that can provide product adoption and usage insights
• Prioritize feedback

Step 2: Maintain Product Vision

• Reaffirm direction with stakeholders
• Review the product roadmap with the team and your stakeholders
• Regularly groom the Kanban board
• Review the user story catalogue and deprecate stories that are no longer valued
• Strive for better team and stakeholder collaboration

Step 3: Conduct Process Improvement Reviews

• Prioritize the type of improvement:
  • Deliberate Improvement: Make features better that add user value. Focus on small incremental improvements that can be quickly deployed
  • Frequency Improvement: Identify features that would benefit from increased usage. Communicate with the team. Incorporate into the product release plan
  • Adoption Improvement: Identify opportunities to recast features that are core to the product but aren’t being used. This may introduce risk; plan potential solutions
• Identify non-valued work (defects, partially done work, unnecessary features, sources of delays) and devise strategies to address it
• Seek to improve the sizing of tasks
• Maintain an “improvement” backlog

Step 4: Prioritize Bugs and New Feature Requests

• Defects lead to customer dissatisfaction and reduce team efficiency
  • Aim for a zero-defect policy
  • Critical bugs have higher priority over new feature development
• Maintain a “root cause registry” of logged defects/bugs
  • Maintain a defect backlog

Step 5: Ongoing Code/Build/Deploy/Release Management

• Commit to feature driven development where the team pulls tasks from the Kanban board
• Review your tooling
  • Are there updates or dependencies that impact the supportability of your product?
• When was the documentation last reviewed?
• Utilize application performance monitoring tools to conduct application flow analysis. This will help to show which features are actually being used
• Conduct code reviews to identify partially done work or features that have not been deployed
• Review image build times
  • Can they be reduced?
• Validate release rollback process

Step 6: Skills Retention Requires a Plan

• Reducing “handoffs” is difficult; studies show that after the 4th handoff only 6% of the original knowledge is retained
• Change is inevitable; ensure you have a succession plan in place for each “role” on your team
• Share knowledge
• Ask for feedback from other groups
• Seek opportunities to invite other interested workers into the team (via “Expression of Interest” Temporary Assignments)
• Engage University/College Co-op students
• Give staff the time to take webinars and other online training

Step 7: Communicate Your Success

• Measure, celebrate, and communicate the team’s workflow throughout the organization with announcements such as newsletters, “lessons learned” webinars, presentations, and author blogs

Guidance to Consider

• Does your team composition (IS21, IS24, IS27s) still reflect the product’s needs?
• Does your team have access to Service Design and User Experience (UX) skills as needed?
• The Kanban board guides activities
• Incident/Bug Tickets can be assigned
• Regularly review your task assignment system (Jira)
• https://www.hotjar.com/usability-testing/

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