Connecting the Dots: The Importance of End to End Visibility
This has nothing to do with retrospectives, but the visibility was pretty good.
Retrospectives, post mortems, after action reviews. These are just a few names for attempts to gain visibility and insights into an entire process. Typically you’ll see these things happen when a company implements something new, such as a project, or when something bad happens, like a data breach or unplanned system outage. The purpose of a retrospective is to take a holistic look at what happened (the events), what went well, and what could have been improved (a nice way of saying what went wrong). An essential piece to a productive retrospective is to have all perspectives to achieve a 360-degree end-to-end view, otherwise you could create a blind spot causing you to miss out on an entire problem area.
Retrospectives are essential for cross functional teams to improve because of the insights shared so everyone can understand downstream affects. Here’s a true story from a few years ago to explain why.
I was working on a project with the charter to refresh IT equipment out at disperse locations for a company. Certain locations required always-on capabilities because of the nature of their work, so scheduling downtime through the site coordinators was difficult. We spend weeks going over availability windows, reviewing requirements for uptime and fine tuning our plans to reduce the outage time. Eventually we were cleared for a 30 minute downtime window early in the morning before any peak hours hit. So we packed up the night before so we could embark on our 2 hour drive before sunrise to meet our 7:00 downtime window.
Upon arriving, I went to meet with the site operator to discuss the plan and make sure he knew what we were going to do, how long it would take, and ensure him his window would be short with minimal downtime. That’s when we found out downtime wasn’t an issue. He only needed a phone to call in if an issue arose or receive a call if the location’s services needed to change. Switching to his cell phone was standard procedure, which he did daily when he goes on lunch break and takes a walk. He said don’t worry about downtime, he could be down for hours with no issues because all of his controls are locally connected and don’t run through the internet, all he required was a 5 minute heads up so he could make a call to corporate and let them know he was switching to his cell.
Months of planning and preparation, starts and stops, and a full redesign to the implementation plan to bring our outage window down to 30 minutes (really it was about 5 but we gave ourselves 30 minutes just in case something went wrong) all to find out there is an established procedure in place and that wasted time was unnecessary. To this day I don’t know if the coordinators were uninformed or making my life difficult on purpose. Maybe we got lucky and the operator on duty that day knew how to work around outages and was laid back enough to roll with the punches. I don’t know, but as a small team we learned to call ahead to the site and discuss with them directly our plan to understand if there were any reservations or if our plan would work for them.
This small example shows, when you get to see for yourself the entire process, end to end, you will discover something you never knew. We were told our work would have downstream impacts, and we found out that wasn’t really true. Yes, taking down the internet did cause disruption, but these sites existed before the internet so of course they had a backup plan. I’m sure they had a backup plan to the backup plan. It wasn’t until we had the chance to talk with the final step in the process that we realized there wasn’t anything to worry about.
And that’s what a full perspective gives you. At a large company a single process can include many teams and individuals, all of whom have a different task to complete to hand off to the next person. It’s easy to stay stuck in our small world thinking only of the tasks on our desks, but opening up our perspective can help make your life easier and those downstream easier.
Applying this notion to a small business now. In your small business this probably isn’t a problem. You have an end to end view because you do all of the tasks. You get to see the outcome of the discount you offered on your sales. You have to endure the pressure of a misquoted deal and how that eats into your profits. That visibility is great, but what do you do with it? Do you conduct a retrospective and write down what happened, what went well, and what went wrong? If not, you should. There’s no better way to improve than to self reflect on what happened and why so you can improve next time.
Don’t believe me? Try it. Get a piece of paper and write the situation at the top. Then make three columns and at the top of those columns write “What went well?”, “What didn’t go well”, and “How can I improve?”
Don’t make it complicated, a piece of paper, a pen, and 15 minutes are all you need for this exercise.
Fill it out and see what you come up with. If you run out of ideas in the first 5 minutes don’t stop. Do this for at least 15 minutes so you have time to really think through what happened and why. The more you put into it the more you will get out.