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The Organizational Manifesto

The organization principles of the V.IO project are inspired by selected capabilities of the Accelerate framework, originally presented in the book Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations. The application of these capabilities to the delivery of Machine Learning projects is discussed in a series of articles published on OCTO's blog .

The initial version of this organizational manifesto was created following our first organizational workshop. However, it should be continously updated to remain the single source of truth that describes our organization to outsiders and new joiners.

  • We work in small batches. We are convinced that exceptional value comes from very rapid feedback loops and we want to be able to track and adjust our trajectory in a short time frame.

    • The work is organized in 1-week sprints, starting on Wednesday mornings and ending on Tuesday evenings the following week.
    • A grooming session is organized on Tuesday evenings with a few team members (at least the PO and the Tech Lead).
    • A 30-minutes sprint planning session is organized on Wednesday mornings with all team members in order to recap the work done over the past sprint and to list the user stories planned for the sprint ahead.

  • We collect customer feedback. Due to the R&D nature of the project, we are conscious of the risk of disconnection with the real customer needs during the development phase. As a result, we want to maintain a close relationship with stakeholders that can act as clients' proxy.

    • A 30-min demo is organized on Wednesdays every 2 sprints to present the current state of the product to relevant stakeholders, including subject matter experts and members of OCTO/Accenture leadership.
    • A demonstrator of the edge station will be installed as soon as possible in OCTO's office, where everyone will be able to interact with the latest version of the continuously deployed system and provide feedback.

  • We ensure a visibility of the value stream. In addition to the day-to-day tasks, we understand the need for everyone to have visibility about the flow of product development work.

    • A link to the V.IO roadmap document presenting the different epics of the project will be shared with everyone and included in this document.

  • We encourage team experimentation. We believe that experimenting will allow us to go beyond our opinions and what we have seen and implemented during our previous experiences and to come up with innovating solutions when dealing with new issues.

    • Team members are encouraged to create spikes to explore potential solutions and to share their findings with everyone during technical work sessions.

  • We set work-in-progress limits. The objective is to avoid issues that could arise from an overload of the "Doing" section of the project's board.

    • We set the maximum number of user stories in the "Doing" section of the board to: (# of active members of the dev team / 2).