What is the meaning of a Whattie?

Definition:   Whattie is person that says ‘What’ a customer needs.  A Whattie is an operational role in service delivery.  A critical distinction of the Whattie role is that the person/s have explicit authority to decide What is required for a card or work item.

The role of Whattie may be either an:
a) Internal requestor – person requesting a service from another team, project, unit; or
b) External Customer – an end user that purchases the service.

Like players on a sporting team, people have a role on the team to be in the right place at the right time to fulfil the obligations of that position.  Similarly, a Whattie is like a virtual baseball cap to show who’s accountable for deciding ‘What’ is needed in the enterprise operations.

More details are available when using the ways of working described by Kanban Accelerated Delivery (https://KanbanAD.com).

A Whattie May be Appointed per Types of Work ..
One or more Whatties may be appointed for each type or work.  This type of work is given by the card on the kanban board.  However for each card it is advised to have one Whattie who is accountable as the chief decision maker for that service request described on the card.

Can a Whattie also be a Howie?
Yes.  It is not uncommon for self-organising teams to delegate a person/s as ‘Whattie’ to triage and prioritise incoming work requests on a kanban card.  Sometime, this triage job of saying What cards are done in what order may be per type of card.

For example, it’s common for IT software development teams to work on cards that represent bugs or defects found in software after it has been released.   These defect cards arrive sporadically and need to be immediately triaged into a priority order based on What is the impact to the customers.  Some IT software development teams rotate this triage role of Whattie.

Which Functions or Departments have Whatties?
All teams, functions, units and departments have this role in operations and project delivery.  Sometimes it is obvious and implied with a job title and often it is a lot less obvious who is actually making the final decision.

Is a Project Manager a Whattie?
They could be. Scope management is a typical responsibility of a Project Manager.  However, upon closer inspection, you may actually find that other people on the steering committee like a project sponsor or key stakeholders are actually dictating the ‘What’.  They key is to define the Whattie as the person who makes the decision of What is required for a card to be completed.

Can there be More than One Whattie per Card?
Yes.  In an ideal world there would be just one person that had the sole authority to make the final decision on What is required per card.  However, when that is not the case, it is better to be explicit and define all the Whatties.

Can there be More than One Whattie per Kanban Board?
Yes. The number of Whatties saying ‘What’ work is required depends on the type of work or card type.   A Whattie can be a person who has the same operational reporting lines or they can be from another completely different area.   The Whattie on a card is the person who makes the decision of What is required for a card to be completed.

For example, for a software development team, having multiple Business Analysts as Whattie’s who are in the same team may accelerate the team’s delivery.

For a marketing team, a Whattie may be the brand, product or marketing manager.

For a human resource team handling recruitment, the line managers within the business functions (and thus are outside the HR team that make the request new roles) are the Whatties.

A Whattie is Not a Job Title ..
A Whattie is not intended as a job title, but an operational role that denotes explicit accountability for sharing and deciding ‘What’ is needed.

History and Origin of Whattie
Becci Watson of Australia began using the terms ‘Whattie’ and ‘Howie’ when coaching Information Technology (IT) teams to accelerate delivery.  At the time, it was popular for many software development teams to use the Scrum framework.

She noted that the arbitrary role of Product Owner by itself was often insufficient to get enough clarity or detail on what the customer needed in a timely manner.  While many were rejecting the roles of Business Analysts, she saw increases in productivity when there were more people who collaborated with the customer, organised customers demonstrations and fed the customer feedback loops back into the team.

Many Business Analysts were handling the work overflowing from the Product Owner and were inadvertently making many of the daily decisions about What was in scope and What was not.  The term ‘pseudo Product Owners’ was seen as a bad thing, in the hope that one person would have both the time and capacity to make thousands of decisions daily. The Business Analysts were unacknowledged Whatties.  Becci observed that balancing the ratio of Whatties to Howies had a substantial measurable impact on improving the productivity of teams.

Some years later, in October 2016 Becci published a blog post Whatties and Howies: Informal Metaphors for Scrum Roles (source: https://becciwatson.com.au/whatties-and-howies/) that provided examples of how she used these roles.

In this post she explains,
Both roles are expected to make suggestions and collaborate, but the Whattie has the final say as being the accountable for ‘What’ is done and the Howies get the final say on ‘How’ they’re going to do it.