Service-Delivery Review: The Missing Agile Feedback Loop?

I’ve been working for many years with software-delivery teams and organizations, most of which use the standard agile feedback loops. Though the product demo, team retrospective and automated tests provide valuable awareness of health and fitness, I have seen teams and their stakeholders struggle to find a reliable construct for an important area of feedback: the fitness of their service delivery. I’m increasingly seeing that the service-delivery review provides the forum for this feedback.

What’s the problem?

Software delivery (and knowledge work in general) consists of two components, one obvious — product — and one not so obvious — service delivery.  I’ve often used the restaurant metaphor to describe this: When you dine out, you as the customer care about the food and drink (product) but also how the meal is delivered to you (service delivery). That “customer” standpoint is one dimension of the quality of these components — we might call it an external view. The other is the internal view — that of the restaurant staff. They, too, care about the product and service delivery, but from a different view: Is the food fresh, kept in proper containers, cooked at the right temperatures, and do the staff work well together, complement each other’s skills, treat each other respectfully (allowing for perhaps the occasional angry outburst from the chef, excusable on account of “artist’s temperament”!). So we have essentially two pairs of dimensions: Component (Product and Service Delivery) and Viewpoint (External and Internal).

In software delivery, we have a few feedback loops to answer three of four of these questions and have more-colloquial terminology for that internal-external dimension (“build the thing right” and “build the right thing”):

The problem is that we typically don’t have a dedicated feedback loop for properly understanding how fit for purpose our service-delivery is. And that’s often equally the most vital concern for our customers — sometimes even more important than the fitness of the product, depending on whether that’s the concern of a delivery team or someone else. (One executive sponsor that I worked with noted that he would rather attend a service-delivery review than a demo.) We may touch on things like the team’s velocity in the course of a demo, but we lack a lightweight structure for having a constructive conversation about this customer concern with the customer. (The team may discuss in a retrospective ways to go faster, but without the customer, they can’t have a collaborative discussion about speed and tradeoffs, nor about the customer’s true expectations and needs.)

A Possible Solution

The kanban cadences include something called a Service-Delivery Review. I’ve been incorporating this to help answer teams’ inability to have the conversation around their service-delivery fitness, and it appears to be providing what they need in some contexts.

David Anderson, writing in 2014, described the review as:

Usually a weekly (but not always) focused discussion between a superior and a subordinate about demand, observed system capability and fitness for purpose Comparison of capability against fitness criteria metrics and target conditions, such as lead time SLA with 60 day, 85% on-time target Discussion & agreement on actions to be taken to improve capability

The way that I define it is based on that definition with minor tweaks:

A regular (usually weekly) quantitatively-oriented discussion between a customer and delivery team about the fitness for purpose of its service delivery.

In the review, teams discuss any and all of the following (sometimes using a service-delivery review canvas):

• Delivery times (aka Cycle/Lead/Time-In-Process) of recently completed work and tail length in delivery-time distribution
• Blocker-clustering results and possible remediations
• Risks and mitigations
• Aging of work-in-progress
• Work-type mix/distribution (e.g., % allocation to work types)
• Service-level expectations of each work item type
• Value demand ratio (ratio of value-added work to failure-demand work)
• Flow efficiency trend

These are not performance areas that teams typically discuss in existing feedback loops, like retrospectives and demos, but they’re quite powerful and important to having a common understanding of what’s important to most customers — and, in my experience, some of the most unnecessarily painful misunderstandings. Moreover, because they are both quantitative and generally fitness-oriented, they help teams and customers build trust together and proactively manage toward greater fitness.

Service-delivery reviews are relatively easy to do, and in my experience provide a high return on time invested. The prerequisites to having them are to:

1. Know your services
2. Discover or establish service-delivery expectations

Janice Linden-Reed very helpfully outlined in her Kanban Cadences presentation the practical aspects of the meeting, including participants, questions to ask and inputs and outputs, which is a fine place to start with the practice.

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Afterward #1: In some places I’ve been, so-called “metrics-based retrospectives” have been a sort of precursor to the service-delivery review, as they include a more data-driven approach to team management. Those are a good start but ultimately don’t provide the same benefit as a service-delivery review because they typically don’t include the stakeholder who can properly close the feedback loop — the customer.

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Afterward #2: Andy Carmichael encourages organizations to measure agility by fitness for purpose, among other things, rather than practice adoption. The service-delivery review is a feedback loop that explicitly looks at this, and one that I’ve found is filling a gap in what teams and their customers need.

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Afterward #3: I should note that you don’t have to be in the business of software delivery to use a service-delivery review. If you, your team, your group or your organization provides a service of any kind (see Kanban Lens and Service-Orientation), you probably want a way to learn about how well you’re delivering that service. I find that the Service-Delivery Review is a useful feedback loop for that purpose.

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[Edited June 12, 2017] Afterward #4 (!):  Mike Burrows helpfully and kindly shared his take on the service-delivery review, which he details in his new book, Agendashift: clean conversations, coherent collaboration, continuous transformation:

Service Delivery Review: This meeting provides regular opportunities to step back from the delivery process and evaluate it thoroughly from multiple perspectives, typically:
• The customer – directly, via user research, customer support, and so on
• The organisation – via a departmental manager, say
• The product – from the product manager, for example
• The technical platform – eg from technical support
• The delivery process – eg from the technical lead and/or delivery manager
• The delivery pipeline – eg from the product manager and/or delivery manager

I include more qualitative stuff than you seem to do, reporting on conversations with the helpdesk, summarising user research, etc

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