Every second Friday of the month, my team holds our Operations Review meeting. Ops Review has been a key element in the cultural change that I've been leading at Corbis. It's a key element in building a high trust culture based on transparency and in driving towards a kaizen culture of continuous improvement by providing an organization level opportunity to reflect on our performance as a team and our ability to deliver on our goals.

I modeled our Ops Review after the Sprintpcs.com version started by John Yuzdepski which I described in Chapter 14 of my book. Chapter 14 is available as a download in PDF.

Our Ops Review is a little different. We hold it as a breakfast meeting at an offsite venue close to our office in downtown Seattle. We've found that free food helps attendance. Also by setting the meeting at 8am for an 8.30am start we don't impinge on the typical geek working day of 10am through 6pm. So there is very little productivity lost. Our meeting is also an "all hands" meeting including all my full time and contract employees and all of those in my colleague Erik Arnold's organization.

By making it an all hands meeting, it provides the whole team with an opportunity to observe how the management team uses the objective data we gather on quality, productivity (throughput), lead time, and variation, to inform management decisions and interventions. It also gives team members a chance to reflect on team performance and suggest ways we can improve.

We also invite value chain partners from other parts of IT and from the rest of the business and some senior management. This month, for our August review, we had our CEO attend. He got to see first hand how transparent we are, and how open we are about discussing what we do well and where we have challenges. He was particularly impressed with how the team is prepared to challenge the data and ask questions to understand the root causes behind blips in the numbers.

Ops Review also gives us an opportunity to celebrate success and build a tribal pride in our performance and achievement. When our SQA manager announces yet another month with zero escaped defects to production, there is a cheer and a loud clapping.

Equally when we have poor performance data to show people will discuss it openly. When we showed some poor data highlighting that project issues had been lying for up to 11 days untriaged, a project manager put up her hand, admitted full responsibility and observed that she'd been distracted, as she was multi-tasking supporting another project while that project's PM was on leave. This showed a number of things. Firstly, that we have a culture of personal safety where people can courageously speak up without fear of loss of face. Indeed the opposite is true. The team respects someone even more when they will admit responsibility and speak up. And this incident acted as a lesson to all of us on the impact of multi-tasking and over-stretching individuals.

While agile methods have always included the idea of project and iteration retrospectives, Operations Review provides an organization level opportunity to build trust, demonstrate transparency and drive continuous improvement. It's an element of the culture required to institutionalize the changes in culture and working practices we've been implementing as a management team. Organization level focus is essential to drive a high maturity organization where capabilities are institutionalized and transfer across teams and projects.

I'll be saying more about Ops Review and what it is doing to change perceptions inside and outside Corbis over the next few blog posts... Technorati tag: Agile, David+Andeerson, Lean, Kaizen, Organizational+Maturity, Agile+Management