Lesson 6: Tailoring Your Practices: Construction Phase

Description
As a DASM, you’ll want to help your team tailor their way of working in every phase of your life
cycle. This lesson covers the Construction phase, including lean concepts and tools that can help
your team excel. You’ll use the DA tool kit to improve a team’s Construction phase processes.

Objectives
Describe the Construction phase and why it is important.
• Define Construction
• Identify process goals associated with the Construction phase
Discuss how to use the DA tool kit to tailor your way of working within a select phase according
to context
• Rank and select process goals according to their relevance to the phase and the team’s
context
• Identify key practices for the team try using goal diagrams
Explain how to Eliminate Waste and Build Quality In (Lean principles)
• Identify the causes of waste and delays
• Describe how to minimize waste through value stream mapping
• Describe the push and pull methods of moving work
• Describe the Kanban approach to managing work in process
• Explain how to build and validate quality into the delivery process
Explain how to Deliver Value Quickly (Lean principle)
• Explain cost of delay
• Describe how to realize value
• Explain the importance of delivering incrementally
• Contrast MBI with MVP

Agenda
1. DA Construction Phase
2. DA Construction Process Goals
3. Agile Practices (Agile life cycle)
4. Lean Tips
a) Deliver Value Quickly
b) Visualize the Value Stream
c) Deliver Incrementally
d) Ensure Value by Building Quality In

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 e) Use Pull Systems and Kanban Boards
5. Choices in the Construction Phase

Lesson Notes

DA Construction Phases and Process Goals

The Construction phase is when we incrementally build a consumable solution.
This phase begins as soon as we complete the Inception phase. We have done the planning to
get our team moving in the right direction. Now we’re ready to start work.
The Construction phase ends when the solution is ready for release and advances to the
Transition phase.

Agile Practices

Planning an Iteration
In agile, the main part of Construction is the iteration.
It all starts when the team gets together to plan the iteration.
Planning the iteration falls under the process goal Produce a Consumable Solution under Plan
the Work.
Chapter 17 in your Choose Your WoW! book provides more information about each option and
the associated risks.

Defining “Done”
During the Construction phase, the team collaborates to create a definition of “done”, or DoD,
which they will apply to every work item to determine when they are finished.
DoD falls under the process goal Accelerate Value Delivery under Verify Quality of Work.
You can look up the various strategies listed and the risks they entail in Chapter 19 of
your Choose Your WoW! book.

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Demonstrating an Iteration
At the end of an iteration, the team conducts an Iteration Review, which includes a Demo. The
team demonstrates each work item to stakeholders to obtain feedback and determine whether
it is ready to move forward to the Transition phase, where it will be deployed.
Demonstrating the iteration falls under the process goal Produce a Consumable Solution under
Ensure Consumability.
You can look up what the options mean and the risks they entail in Chapter 17 in your Choose
Your WoW! book.

Lean Tips: Deliver Value Quickly

Lean is an approach that produces value for customers quickly through a focus on reducing
delays and eliminating waste, which results in increased quality and lower cost.
To deliver value quickly, deliver the smallest unit possible that will create value for the
customer.
The key is to:
• Focus on time instead of cost.
• Focus on removing delays rather than on going fast.
• Achieve flow by working on smaller things and with people fully allocated to the work.
• Limit batch size.

Lean Value
In Lean, value is:
• What the customer considers important
• What the business invests in
• What is most useful to the customer upon release

Realizing Value
What does it mean to realize value? When is value realized?
“A product, feature or service has value if the customer considers it important at the time it is
delivered. Value is realized when it is used.”

Lean Tip: Visualizing the Value Stream

To realize value, we need to look at the value stream the path from ideation of a product or
feature to delivery to the customer. The construction phase is an important part of the value
stream, during which we focus on building features that will have value for the customer.

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Cost of Delay
What is the cost of delay?
The cost of delay is the lost revenue or opportunity caused by the delay between conceiving the
idea and having customers realize value from it.
The longer the period between the two, the greater the loss in revenue.”
Every day without realizing the value is a day without revenue from it. So the delay costs
money, and the cost increases with each day. There is also the cost of more time and effort
expended during this period.

Minimum Business Increment vs. Minimum Viable Product

Minimum Business Increments:
• Build the smallest enhancement to an existing product
• Investment for revenue
Minimum Viable Product:
• Take the smallest step to determine viability of a new product without a customer base
• Investment for discovery

Job Sequencing
Sequence jobs, not in order of priority, but in order of which MBI can realize the most value
more quickly than the others.
MBIs are perfect for this because they are, by nature, deployable and consumable.

Lean Tip: Ensure Value by Building Quality In

Building quality in means continuously checking quality because delays in doing so will cost
more in the short and long term.
“Build quality in” means:
• Continuous validation: test the work being done
• Continuous integration: test the dependencies
• Continuous deployment: test value of the work being done

Lean Tip: Eliminating Waste

Eliminating waste starts with looking at areas where waste tends to occur. For delivery teams,
waste is most often manifested as delays. Let’s look more closely at how to eliminate waste.

Sources of Waste
These are some of the most common sources of waste in our work:
• Miscommunication
• Building the wrong thing

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 • Building items of less importance
• Lost realization due to delays
• Aging information
• Relearning
• Handoffs and hand-backs
• Defects

Value Stream Mapping to Find the Cause

Value stream mapping helps teams look at the path followed to realize value and then to
pinpoint problem areas, where there is waste or delay.
Note that you need to look beyond the construction phase and beyond your own part of the
value stream.
Five Whys” analysis is a variant of “who, what, when, where, why” by Taiichi Ohno, creator of
the Toyota Production System.
He suggested that continuing to ask “why” several times would get you insights into the root
cause of things.
The “Five” is a “rule of thumb” to encourage you to keep digging. It doesn’t have to be five
questions exactly.

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Lesson 7: Tailoring Your Practices: Transition Phase
Description
As DASMs, we deal with conflict in our jobs and among team members on an almost daily
basis. In this lesson you’ll learn how to use conflict to solve problems and to minimize
conflict when it is unhealthy. You can lead your teams on their way to high performance
using your conflict resolution skills.

Objectives
Describe the Transition phase and why it is important.
• Define Transition
• Identify process goals associated with the Transition phase
Discuss how to use the DA tool kit to tailor your way of working within a select phase according
to context
• Rank and select process goals according to their relevance to the phase and the team’s
context
• Identify key practices for the team try using goal diagrams

Agenda
1. The Transition phase
2. Transition phase process goals
3. Choosing a process goal, a decision point and an option

Lesson Notes

Project Phases
Project-based life cycles—even agile and lean ones—go through phases.
It all starts with Inception when the team envisions and plans the project, doing just enough
work to get organized and get going in the right direction. The team will initially form itself,
then invest some time in initial requirements and architecture exploration, initial planning,
aligning itself with the rest of the organization and securing funding for the rest of the project.
The process continues with Construction. The team produces a consumable solution with
enough functionality to be valuable to stakeholders. During this phase, the team will be
performing analysis, design, programming, testing and management activities every single day.
And finally, the process concludes with Transition. The team releases its solution into
production. This includes both determining whether the solution is ready to be deployed and
then actually deploying it.

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Transition is sometimes referred to as a “release sprint (or iteration)” or a “deployment sprint,”
and if the team is struggling with quality, a “hardening sprint.”
The aim of the Transition phase is to successfully release your solution into production. This
includes determining whether you are ready to deploy the solution and then actually deploying
it.

Transition Phase Process Goals

The Transition phase has two process goals:
• Ensure product readiness
• Deploy the solution

Ensure Production Readiness

The aim of the Ensure Production Readiness process goal is to determine whether you can
safely deploy your solution into production. Remember, your team is producing a consumable
solution—that is, usable and desirable and functional. Something that actually gets the job
done.
Although your team should have produced a potentially consumable solution all the way
through the Construction phase, this is your last chance to ensure the solution is consumable
before deploying it to stakeholders. This goal is important because it reduces the risks
associated with deployment by ensuring that the team is technically ready to deliver and that
stakeholders are prepared to receive new functionality.
It's important to note that this goal reflects the realities faced by teams that are following
project-based life cycles:
• Scrum-based Agile life cycle
• Kanban-based Lean life cycle
Teams following these life cycles tend to release into production every few months (or more)
and have not yet completely automated their regression tests nor adopted the continuous
integration/continuous deployment pipeline required to evolve into one of the two continuous
delivery life cycles.

Deploy the Solutions

The aim of the Deploy the Solution process goal is to provide options for how to successfully
release your solution into production. A typical disciplined agilist may react with “Well, why
don’t we just completely automate this?”
And they're right, they should fully automate deployment.
This process goal is important because:
• It captures several strategies for automating deployment.
• It provides several strategies for releasing your solution into production.
• It describes what needs to be performed to successfully release into production.

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