Managing over 300 Agile Teams at Verizon

We met with Richard Dalton, Head of Design at Verizon, to understand the challenges that he faces in managing over 300 agile teams and how they can improve efficiency through better coordination.

If we were focused on trying to do one thing, build one product or one feature we could nail that. There's no problem. The challenge for Verizon comes because we're trying to do 500 things at once.

Verizon launches dozens of either new products or new features every year. Coordinating and orchestrating the work of the different teams required to implement all of these products is a significant challenge, and one that Richard believes they could be doing better.

Challenges aligning teams to customer journeys

Verizon has over 300 cross-functional Agile Collaborative Teams (ACT) with a variety of different areas of responsibility. Richard shares that, as a design leader, he has a bias for aligning the teams with customer needs. But at the scale of Verizon there are challenges.

Reuse versus autonomy

When you align teams to the customer journey duplication becomes an issue. Richard gives the example of the buying process. You could have one team that owned the design and code of all of the screens that somebody needs to go through when they're getting the new phone. But those are the same screens that somebody would use if they're upgrading their phone or trading in or getting support.

There's so much reuse across our ecosystem and we support such a wide variety of different activities and tasks with multiple products involved that allowing teams to be aligned purely on the customer activity would create so much inefficiency and duplication that it would it would really cause us to struggle.

Another area where this impacts the structure is capabilities teams, which are more back-office centric. Examples include authentication capabilities, the personalisation engine and the content management system. Separating out this functionality reduces the duplication overhead but it introduces dependencies between teams whenever a change requires an update to one of these capabilities.

Number of channels

There is only so much scope each team can handle before the complexity slows them down. Verizon have multiple different channels that they interact with customers through such as their website, their customer support channel ‘Care’ as well as in physical stores. Each of the channels has a very different context which influences the design of the solutions for those channels. Separating out the channel responsibility into different teams reduces the cognitive load on each team and allows them to create much more targeted solutions for customers. But whenever a new product or feature is launched there needs to be coordination across the channels.

The impact of the inter-dependencies between teams

Richard uses the metaphor of jam jars to explain the problem. He equates the 300 ACT teams to 300 jam jars, all of which are full with water representing their backlog of user features within their teams scope, improvement work and new product launches. And then a new product launch comes along. We need to now add water to 42 of those 300 jam jars and some of them will overflow. The brunt of this is being felt by the teams. Richard shares a story from one Agile Product Owner:

“Last week I got seven, people coming to me saying, ‘Hey, next month I need you to do this’. I now have to decide which things are the highest priority or the least priority. That’s fine for some things within my own scope but the challenge is for these bigger, broader product initiatives that are more company or enterprise wide. I have to go and talk to the other 41 impacted teams and say are you prioritizing that highly? If so, I should too.”

The problem is bad enough if there is a single project that changes. But in reality it's not just one project , it's dozens of projects.

The reason this matters more today than in previous years is that Verizon cares more about delivering a consistent experience across all channels. In the past if the wording and experience was different between in-store and online it didn’t really matter but now they have higher expectations for the coherency of the experience.

No plan survives first contact with a customer

Verizon have tried to solve this problem before using frameworks like SAFe. But the idealised plans that come out from the big quarterly planning events don’t match with the dynamic nature of modern businesses.

It only takes one business unit to say, “Hey, we got this new idea”, or a regulatory change that arises from a new law for the plan to become obsolete. And as Richard says, everything is always urgent.

We use SAFe and we have big room planning quarterly or monthly where we get everybody in a room and do these things. It just doesn't scale… we can't get together in big room planning every day.

Enterprise Portfolio Planning

Recognising that they couldn’t be the first to experience these issues, Verizon went looking for tools to help them solve these coordination problems.

We should be able to ask the portfolio management software to give me a solution that can get this thing done in this time. What needs to come out of the portfolio or how do I need to redistribute resources? Show me two or three different solutions and the impacts of those.

The manual replanning is the most time consuming part of the process. If a system can automatically identify multiple different replans with the corresponding impacts it will greatly speed up deliveries and increase efficiency across the board.

But these systems are not cheap. Licensing and implementing such an enterprise portfolio planning system will cost millions, However, as Richard points out, you would never expect finance to run on Excel, or to manage thousands of call center employees on Excel, so why should we manage hundreds of millions of IT spend on Excel?

The second major challenge is that the implementation will disrupt the ability of teams to deliver because it will add more water to every jar. Richard is all too aware of this as he highlights that this is a truly people, process, technology, information (PPTI) solution. It will involve a lot of change management and buy-in from the teams to be successful.

Despite the challenges Richard is confident in the outcomes that they can achieve.

The efficiency gains alone of putting this in place will probably pay for itself in a week. We have a pretty substantial budget running to hundreds of millions of dollars.. so if we can get a 2% efficiency increase it would pay for itself. I actually think it's going to be like 10 or 20%.

You can listen to the podcast on Spotify

Or you can watch the video of the conversation on YouTube: