Ten Success Factors to establish the Perfect IBM Garage Squad
At the heart of every IBM Garage are the garage squads that make up the driving engine for the garage. A well-established squad is like a well-oiled machine. The IBM Garage squads work iteration after iteration to generate high business value outcomes while maintaining a steady velocity and be measured at a high standard of quality. For these squads to achieve this level of efficiency and harmony, they need to be formed from teams that have the right mixture of talent, skill, and growth mindset. That is the secret sauce for successful squads. Easily said but hard to achieve, that is mainly due to one key critical component which is chemistry between squad members. A high-performing squad has chemistry they care about one another and their success is more than just success it is the pride of the squad. They also care about one another personally, so you would see these squads work relations strengthened with time but also crossing over to their personal lives to the point that they end up becoming close friends. This is analogical to army squads, the more they suffer and endure together the strong the bond between them and the more efficient and effective they become. In conclusion, we need long-lasting engagements for the squad to achieve peak performance. That helps us put our hand on the first key success factor for the perfect IBM Garage Squad, which is:
At the helm of the squad is the squad leader, in my humble opinion, the squad leader in an IBM Garage is the agent of change, they are the reason we have an IBM Garage and not a normal Agile project. The squad leader should exhibit a lot of capability that combines the key practices that make up IBM Garage such as Lean Startup, Lean UX, Enterprise Design Thinking (EDT), Agile as well as some concepts in DevOps. I also found that the most successful Squad Leaders are certified EDT coaches, that is not only due to their ability to facilitate complex workshops but because they are creative by nature and they use that creativity to inspire their squads to think out of the box and overcome every challenge they face. In any way, IBM Garage is the place to co-create so who best can lead the teams in IBM Garage than our best creatives. Another component a great squad leader should exhibit is strong belief and experience in Agile practices. Yes, anyone can learn agile but believing in Agile and driving it deeper into the squad culture is the difference a strong squad leader makes. Not only does the squad leader need to define the ceremonies that the squad will follow and enforce them, but also, they are expected to make the squad believe and enjoy these ceremonies. With that we have our second success factor:
The second most important role in a squad is the architect. The more knowledgeable and experienced they are the more successful will the squad be. The architect also plays an important role to keep the squad focused on the bigger picture and prevent them from getting lost in the weeds. The architect does all of that by abstracting the complexity of the solution in a manner that every member of the squad can understand. There is another very important role that the architect plays. The architect performs as a design authority governing the design and implementation of the solution and dealing with any technical risks or impediments that the squad will face. The architect should listen to everyone in the squad but when it comes to making a technical decision, they have the authority to set the path forward and the squad needs to trust in their experience and wisdom. That uncovers our third success factor:
Since we are counting the third important role in the squad is the Research/UX Designer, and this because a product will never be successful if the user experience is not well-conceived and based on actual user research. Some might challenge that there are products that do not have a user interface and hence do not need a UX designer. In my view that is not correct no matter what the product is if there is a user, a UX designer will add value to that product. That is why the Research/UX Designer is critical in the success of the squad, without the right focus on how users will use this product even we deliver all the required features it might not be usable. Unveiling our fourth success factor:
Well, where does the rest of the squad come in? In fact, everyone in the squad is as important as the first three. The success of a squad results from every person’s contributions and their volunteer efforts to help when challenges surface. The rest of the squad members will be formed based on the product being developed. That will vary if we are transforming an existing process into an intelligent workflow, or if we are just creating a new algorithm to optimize shelf replenishment, or a mobile app. that is consumer-facing, or an enterprise HR solution to improve employee well being, or an IoT solution that is making sure a manufacturing line is working at its peak capacity, or a blockchain solution that establishes trust between multiple shippers and government custom organizations and shipping yard operation, or even a quantum solution to discover new materials that exhibit properties needed in our accelerated future development. As you can see there is really no predefined set of skills that you would need on any squad it is really based on the product that your squad will be formed. Wish leads to our fifth success factor:
Each member is expected to have depth and breadth of skills. Their depth makes them the SME in that area on their team while their breadth lets them progress the entire squad independently and be able to help when one area needs more resources. Both depth and breadth are equally as important. A common term for mobile and web applications is a full-stack engineer, which means they have most of the skills to develop a solution from the front end to the back end, without having to depend on others. Even if one person can do everything when we plan squads, we need to consider the timeline. We want as much work to be done in parallel to deliver the product with speed also so as not to overload one person. In the case of mobile or web applications, even though we might have full-stack engineer we usually staff the squad with separate resources for Front End and Back End, so while the Front End resources are working on developing the UI the back end resources are creating the back end APIs, and with simple integration, we could potentially cut down the delivery time by 1/3 or a little more if we had resources going sequentially from front end to back end. Our sixth success factor is:
One of the major reasons why IBM Garage squads are more efficient and productive is due to their garage culture. The garage culture has evolved from various cultures, first from agile and DevOps, then from IBM Studios Lean UX and Enterprise Design Thinking, and lastly from Lean Startup. I prefer not to call these practices and instead call them cultures, as it is more about believing in a practice and performing it from the heart, than just learning a practice and executing it efficiently. The Agile and DevOps culture introduces the right level of rigor while allowing for squad autonomy and empowerment to make the right decisions. IBM Studios culture is hard to explain it has to be experienced to be understood fully but let me try my best, our IBM studios act as a melting pot for the diversity of knowledge and encourage creativity and eccentric thinking to generate original ideas that would have otherwise not surfaced. Enterprise Design Thinking culture is based on a set of practices that employ diverge and converge techniques to allow every participant's voice to be heard and taken into consideration. This EDT culture applied in a rapid iterative manner aligns best with Lean UX, where we prototype and eliminate failure cases fast so we can focus on the most promising ideas. Finally, with Lean Startup culture adopted by most entrepreneurship makes it ideal in a garage model where we seek to validate a product to market-fit and scale it. The evolution of all these cultures together makes up the squad culture which is essential to its success only if it is believed in and executed from the heart. The squad culture is also defined at the personal level. What habits does the squad tend to favor, such as weekend outings, casual happy hours, or even monthly birthday celebration, all of that makes up the squad culture. So our seventh success factor is:
The squad needs to reflect on its work and improves its performance with time. Agile introduces retrospective sessions that are adopted in the IBM Garage squad culture to a great extent. Through these retrospectives, most problems the squad is facing can be addressed so the next iterations can become more successful. For example, if one of the recently introduced squad members doesn’t have the right skills and is dragging the entire squad behind. That would be surfaced in the retrospective and the squad will act as a family and agree to take the right action to bring that person up to speed, so overall the squad can be more efficient. This leads to our eighth success factor:
Due to the current challenges, garages had to discover what remote work means, while others were already familiar with that way of working for years. It is no secret IBM Garage purest would tell you the team needs to be co-located, although there is great value to collocation it is not essential to happen all the time. Some squads are formed across dispersed geographic locations and although they manage to travel to collocate it is not a sustainable model, some have decided to collocate one week and work remotely one week, others have decided to work remotely most of the time and collocate during key ceremonies. For the squad to build chemistry and harmony, it is essential they do meet from time to time. That will improve the quality of communication and build relations to allow for the squad members to support one another when the situation calls for it. Now if everyone is working remotely how could these meetups happen, humans are very creative and have come up with ways to hold virtual happy hours, or always-on web conferences that allow individuals working remotely to stay connected. With that our ninth success factor is:
The commercials of the garage play a big role in the contract being signed. Especially that it is a fixed capacity model with the client taking on a big part of the risk. With the current market competition, this makes getting a garage deal signed harder if we do not utilize our global resources to make the offer more competitive. Most would think that would introduce efficiency or quality factors, but that is more ignorance than fact. Our global resources are not the traditional low-cost staff augmentation resources, they have evolved over the years and now become an irreplaceable component in our overall technical vitality. So, with that in mind what is the best way to form a squad that will include global resources. The most important factor to consider is to keep the majority of the squad in the same time zone. Finally, our tenth success factor is:
So, in summary, establishing the perfect IBM Garage Squad is essential for the garage success, and here are ten success factors that can guide you along the way:
1. Maintain the squad together at all costs, roles can change but people should not.
2. The squad leader needs to be creative, influential, and motivational.
3. The Architect needs to be a hands-on experienced leader, with strong drive capability.
4. Base everything, we decide or build on well-founded research and user experience.
5. Extend the squad with the right technology and industry SMEs.
6. Most of the squad members should be T shape skilled.
7. The culture that the squad believes in will secure its success.
8. Squad retrospectives are essential to reshape the squad for success.
9. Regular squad meetups are instrumental in improving communication and collaboration.
10. Most of the squad members should be in the same time zone.
I would like to leave you with one last quote and then I would love to hear your thoughts.
“A perfect IBM Garage squad is any squad that enjoys working together and achieves the needed business success to justify its existence”
Authored by Dr. Mohamed El-Refai, IBM Distinguished Engineer, IBM Garage Assets and Platform Leader
Illustrated by Chloe Sun and Olivia Wen, IBM Studios Dalian Designers
Learn more at www.ibm.com/garage
