Chaos drives innovation

Submitted by skeptic on Sat, 2019-05-25 23:38

Chaos drives disruption and disruption triggers innovation.

In general we should capture any failure as an asset full of learning value. Capturing chaos to drive innovation is the same principle writ large. Never let a good crisis go to waste. Be ready, have the experimental results, have the thinking already done.

Happy 13th Birthday to me

Submitted by skeptic on Thu, 2019-05-16 03:33

Today (16th May) is the IT Skeptic's 13th Birthday! This blog went live on this day in 2006.
This is blog post 1389.

When I dig back in the archives there is much that is embarrassing, that I'd love to rewrite (or bury).
And much that isn't so relevant any more.
But there are some I'm still pretty pleased with from the deep past.

Headroom

Submitted by skeptic on Wed, 2019-05-15 18:03

It's more important to improve work than to do work.

Too many managers think improvement will happen magically in people's spare time.
If an organisation has a time recording system, a fun question is to ask how improvement is recorded. Often there are no codes for it.

If people have no headroom to do improvement then it won't happen. You'll be working the same way next year.

Open space for leadership

Submitted by skeptic on Tue, 2019-05-14 17:53

We*'re on a journey of discovery into a new domain of thought.

After our growth and exploration of Agile into the enterprise context, and our positive experiences there, we are having our minds further expanded after stumbling over the Open Leadership Network. We are currently at the inaugural conference in Boston.

Kill the CAB some more

Submitted by skeptic on Sun, 2019-05-12 05:57

Accelerate says Approval Board. I say get rid of it.

Silvia Botrow tweeted this
Image

It is from the DevOps book Accelerate (I checked).

Agile continual improvement

Submitted by skeptic on Sun, 2019-05-05 21:01

Pursuit of improvement can hurt innovation. Agility is not how fast you can go, it is how fast you can change. So endless optimisation through continual Improvement can misdirect you

Doug Tedder is one of a group of ITSM writers who write good sense. He writes:

Treat staff like adults and equals

Submitted by skeptic on Thu, 2019-03-28 06:22

There is a sea change in work, whether within IT or outside. It's a renaissance: a complete shift in how we think about employees and management. The portmanteau is usually "Agile" but it is far far more than that. It is a confluence of many new (and not so new) ideas. At their heart is a restoration of humanity, of human values, a unification of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

Firing people is always a last resort.

Submitted by skeptic on Thu, 2019-02-07 21:24

Firing people should always be a last resort, not an instrument of culture change.

My changing mind

Submitted by skeptic on Sun, 2019-01-27 07:58

It's lucky for me that I don't get the kind of attention which would lead to people comparing my current posts to my old ones. There is nothing worse than having your own words quoted back to you a decade later. And this blog has been going 12 years, so my views have certainly changed over that time - not drifted slightly, but shifted majorly. Here are some examples:

Kill the ticket

Submitted by skeptic on Sat, 2019-01-26 10:27

I really like the "kill the ticket" movement in DevOps. (hat tip to Damon Edwards). A ticket means a work record in a tool like Remedy or Service Now to represent an incident, problem, change request, defect....

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