In The Unicorn Project, Gene Kim defines five ideals of DevOps:24 1.Locality and Simplicity: alleviate dependencies between teams and components. 2.Focus, Flow, and Joy: the smooth flow of work that enables focus and joy. 3.Improvement of Daily Work: continuously improve and pay down technical debt. 4.Psychological Safety: a top predictor of team

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A corollary of Conway’s Law is that an organization’s structures themselves can be constrained by the architectures that they designed many years earlier. And without intentional action, it’s a Catch-22. “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking we used when we created them,” Einstein said. An example of this antipattern is a

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Instead, it is necessary to optimize for early and often learning in a real environment with real customers or consumers. This lowers the risk of delivery, generates value earlier, enables pivoting to maximize value, and locks in progress as you go. The best part is that, unlike pouring concrete, which sets, with knowledge-based products and

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In a 2017 presentation, Sidney Dekker describes a review of safety outcomes within a hospital. Investigations of root causes of failure included human errors, procedural violations, and miscalculations. However, investigations of successful outcomes identified exactly the same root causes of success: human errors, procedural violations,

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In The Unicorn Project, Gene Kim defines five ideals of DevOps:24 1.Locality and Simplicity: alleviate dependencies between teams and components. 2.Focus, Flow, and Joy: the smooth flow of work that enables focus and joy. 3.Improvement of Daily Work: continuously improve and pay down technical debt. 4.Psychological Safety: a top predictor of team

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Which brings us to Gantt charts. In Chapter 0, I gave an overview of the Gantt chart. Created by Henry Gantt, who worked with Frederick Taylor in the early 1900s, it was originally called a Man Record Chart. A line represented whether a worker had shoveled enough coal or moved enough crude iron for the day, as determined by the “foreman.” The

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The idea of servant leadership was proposed by Robert Greenleaf in a 1970 essay, “The Servant as Leader.” Greenleaf distinguished between leaders who are motivated by leadership and leaders who see their role as helping others to achieve their potential. The best test of leadership, he argued, is whether those served grow as persons, whether they

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Software benefits from both an agile and lean approach. The software binary is agile-created and the path to production is lean, as the build, test, deploy process should run repetitively and with a high degree of automation many times a day. Periodically there will be step-change agile experimentation in the path to production and then back into

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In order to share learnings across value streams and across the small CoEs, the addition of voluntary, open invite Communities of Practice (CoPs) is incredibly useful and powerful. Here, the Law of Mobility applies: attendance is voluntary. They are Darwinian in that they are not artificially kept alive. They are run as a regular meetup to help

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