Out Of House FlowChain

When I conceived of FlowChain, some six years ago now, my immediate context was development shops with their own in-house developers, and other supporting staff.

But it strikes me that with just a few adjustments, it’s also suitable for organisations that sub-contract out most or all of their development projects to third parties.

These adjustments centre around arranging for the various third parties (assuming, in the likely case, that there’s more than one) to each contribute staff to the “Pool” (see diagram). These arrangements include:

Commercial

How will the third parties be paid? Some UK government functions use function points as a measure of “work done”, with a set price for each function point “delivered”. See: Output-based contracts. I can imagine other contractual arrangements, too.

Social

How will the third parties’ staff integrate or form healthy relationships with the in-house commissioning staff (a.k.a. product owners)? Will there be shared spaces? Regular visits to and fro? Some more technical forms of communication (Twitter, chat, video conferencing, etc.)? Remember, each backlog item is sized for two to three people working together for two to three days.

Tooling

Third parties remain free to pull items from the backlog as they see fit (just as with in-house FlowChain), and use their own tools, languages, etc.. I foresee some advantages in having a common code repository, coding and other standards, agree requirements around test suites, and so on.

Delivery Into Production

Maybe the organisation contracting the third parties has its own Ops department. In this case the interface between development (teams, third parties) and Ops would probable best be standardised and agreed (like an API). If the third parties have their own Ops folks, then they can do DevOps in their own space and time, and serve the “production” services – or even micro-services – they each operate, directly to users.

Shared Backlog

For clarity, this variant of Flowchain retains the enterprise-wide backlog, with user stories, improvement stories, etc. being prioritised by some black box (or white box) prioritisation algorithm, committee, manager, or whatever. The only real change is in how the Pool is constituted. Note: I see no particular reason why the general FlowChain principle of “ANY unassigned development folks from the Pool can coalesce around each new top backlog item” cannot stand, here.

There may even be emergent advantages in having e.g. developers from different third parties coming together to collaborate on specific backlog items. How weird would that be? Again, policy would guide folks’ actions here.

Who would “manage” the backlog?  This could be done by a small in-house staff, or itself subcontracted out to one or more third parties. Note: the backlog in FlowChain is largely self-managing, in any case, given an effective prioritisation algorithm or approach.

Flow

Flow (of e.g. software into the hands of those whose needs are being attended to) remains the key objective of the whole approach.

Growing An In-house Capability

For organisations without an in-house development capability, this approach provides a simple(r) path to establishing and growing an in-house development capability. In-house developers can be added, one by one, as and when circumstances (budgets, priorities, etc) allow. These new folks can work alongside – and learn from – third-party staff already used to Pool working, and the balance between in-house and out-of-house staff, skill sets, etc. adjusted dynamically as needs dictate.

Drawbacks

The key drawback I foresee is in the matter of dev-ops integration (DevOps). This could prove more difficult, in the case where developers, etc. are out-of-house and Ops in-house. This seems a special case of the issues of outsourcing and offshoring, generally. But I’m sure a bunch of smart developers and smart ops can work this out, especially with some help and guidance.

– Bob