Why Include Business Context in Project Readiness?ADAPT a framework for scaling teams

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IntroductionBlog and personal contact informationgaurav@kinatus.com

@gaurav_kinatus

http://www.kinatus.com/lounge

Healthcare IT, Financial Industry, evangelizing IT with kidshttps://www.linkedin.com/pub/gaurav-garg/2/9b4/a9Gaurav GargVice President, Solution Calance

I like building engines understand the business needs, setup a repeatable process, scale the team and trigger cruise control. Hand over the keys and solve another business problem. This session is about building teams but it equally applicable to individual developers.

Create solutionsBuild team (process, training)Create partnerships with OEMs

Why Include Business Context In Project Readiness

In a world of outsourcing, consulting companies and millions of developers all clamoring for the same jobs, its increasingly both important and difficult to differentiate yourself from the crowd. But if you can speak the language of the business, you become their go-to developer to get the job done.

We all intuitively understand that IT exist as a support service to the business. No one wants to get up in the morning and say, I am going to do a really terrible job, today.

When I quit my last job, I had hundreds of resumes in my Inbox. Trust is built based on shared battle scars. Once you establish trust, your team will remember you forever!

How many product managers are in the audience?Any managers/supervisors?Microsoft employees, certifications?Healthcare connections?3

What is The Common Factor?

Let me share some experiences about building teams.

Four clients - all of them are large corporations, with large number of smart engineers. All of them have partners and consultants.

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Microsoft Health Solutions Group

The day I got a call from a Microsoft Director, that the Calance team is cheating in Healthcare Integration Engine certificationsEventually, Microsoft outsourced the Training and Certification process for employees and partners to Calance. Later, Calance also got the partner sandbox support and the sales demo development.

In 2010, Calance partnered with Microsoft for a Healthcare Integration platform (Amalga). Microsoft partnered with multiple consulting firms, including a Big Five consulting and a large outsourcing provider based in NJ. Rest of the partners had 68% pass rate on the certification program. Calance employees were cruising at 95% success rate. After I presented the approach for project readiness to Microsoft Training team, Microsoft outsourced the training operations for Amalga and Sentillion, partner sandbox support and the sales demo development to my team.

Further, Microsoft HSG services head called me to build a team for him at GE Healthcare.5

World Leader in Global Trade Advisory

The day Nandan Nilekani, Co-Chairman Infosys searched for a Program Manager, ignoring VPs, AVP and the Account ManagerGlobal Trading requires compliance with local regulations and a network of local banks. The Mainframe application would take up to 6 months for entering new markets. Refactoring the application became my top priority. In addition, I trained my team in seven applications on multiple technologies and a data warehouse. The effort was noticed by the business and IT executives.

In 2005, ABN AMRO (now Royal Bank of Scotland) signed the largest outsourcing deal of that time with Infosys. Nandan met the CIO and the leadership team in Chicago. Immediately after the meeting Nandan was searching for the portfolio manager of the Global Trade Advisory team. Global Trade Advisory, the bread and butter of ABN AMRO, had cut the time to market to 1/3 in last six months implementing industry changing SOAP over CICS solution. ABN AMRO mentioned this to Nandan.

GTA business users tripled the IT budget over the next 12 months.6

Largest VISA Issuers In The World

The day two senior leaders from JP Morgan Chase flew to Los Angeles for a meeting at UCLA and demanded to know how I pulled it off?ADAPT framework was born at FirstUSA Bank (now JP Morgan Chase) in 2002. I was sent to save the account. When I landed in Delaware, I realized the team knew technology but did not understand the workflows and business context.

In 2012, Calace and UCLA won a federal grant for building a product for incentive management for federally funded clinical research. We needed a branded debit card for disbursing the incentives. Two executives from JP Morgan Chase flew down from Chicago to meet us at UCLA. First thing they asked me is Who are you and how did you manage to get us on a plane? We manage federal debit cards programs and billion dollars federal organizations have to come down to meet us. We dont go anywhere.

Backstory in 2002, I was sent to First USA because the client was ready shut down the account. When I landed, I realized the team was comprised of capable engineers but they did not understand the business. Over the three weeks, I created a framework for making sure the engineers focused on What and Why besides How. ADAPT was born at FirstUSA. FirstUSA insisted on my presence for future business. For the next three years, I managed the credit card fraud and risk review applications portfolio.

During my tenure with JPMC, I helped FirstUSA build a straight through processing system for the credit card fraud detection system (US patent issued). Eventually, First USA became BankOne and later bought JP Morgan Chase. Same team increased the fraud recovery from 68% to 80%+ saving the bank Millions of dollars! 7

Full Transparencywith the Client

Identify Clients NeedsCreate Assessment Assess gapPersonalized Training

People

Process

Tools

Metrics

Project Readiness

Whats the difference between technical training and project readiness?The focus is on the ability to apply knowledge, in the business context. Not on the ability to memorize and regurgitate syntax.Nobody writes the code from the scratch any more. There are libraries available to do most things.Even if you are automating a new workflow, you still need to understand the existing assets and how they interact with your new application.Technical training tends to be individual activity. You dont get the rhythm of business. Transparency.

Self AssessmentIdentify ImprovementAreasSpecific Training on ImprovementAreasScenario Based Certification TasksEvery team member performs a self-assessment before they are allowed to work on any project.Based on the self-assessment, a personalized improvement profile is generated.Each improvement area is already mapped to training modules.LMS tracks the progress on self-driven training and schedule events.Whenever an individual is ready, they can take the assessment.Competency based objective roles. No need for stacked ranking.

Assessment Driven Approach for Project Training

In the background, someone has to design a multi-dimensional profile of technical skills, business knowledge and application workflow.

Modern software development teams, often, require multiple rolesTeams go through stages of maturity, before hitting the high performance cadence. Forming -> Norming -> Storming -> Performing.ADAPT forces everyone to collaborateEveryone in the team learns, quickly, what to expect from others and produce what is useful for others to do their jobWhy Assessments?

Stages of team developmenthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuckman%27s_stages_of_group_development

Assessment EngineEach Assessment is time boxed. Team members are allowed to use any resource they can find (books, Internet, existing code libraries)If the team member can finish the assessment within the time box, they pass. Otherwise, they have to go back to training material and take the assessment on the topic again, when they are ready.Product Managers (business analysts in the past) are given different kind of assessment. They are given a napkin requirement and asked to create user stories that made sense to the development team.Architects are given the user stories created by the product managers. They need to create solution architecture and design documents. The architecture and design documents are folded into developers assessments.

Using ADAPT to build a consulting practice for Healthcare Data Warehouse

LMS tackles the essential challenges that contribute to business growth and success - hiring, retaining, and developing TALENT. Case Study