But what about the BAU work?

People soon realise how much faster work can move through the system–how much sooner we can realise value–by moving the people to the work; rearranging people into teams aligned with these value streams.

For programme-scale product development—typically in the 50-200 person range—we run quarterly planning sessions where we review progress, align on direction and strategy, and set ourselves challenging goals using OKRs. We also use these sessions as an excuse to celebrate what we have achieved. Based on these new goals, there may be some movement of people between teams. Sometimes teams may disperse and new teams form as the profile of the work changes.

You can only do this if you understand all the different demands on the teams. Whether you model your product development work as features, epics, stories, experiments or goals, this still represents only one type of work, namely customer-facing delivery. Unless you can see all the competing sources of demand on the teams and on the organisation—and treat all of this as first-class work—you will continue to be disappointed that your expectations go unmet as all that unmanaged “ghost” work gets in the way.