Separating out work and personnel management

Submitted by skeptic on Fri, 2019-10-18 08:16

I believe the future is to separate work management from personnel ("people") management. This isn't my idea. It has been around forever in various forms. We have tried these ideas in the past. I worked in a matrixed organisation in 1985-7.

Agile hasn't jumped the shark, it has just escaped the pond.

Submitted by skeptic on Fri, 2019-10-11 22:11

Boy, Agile Enterprise didn't take long to leap over the hype curve into the trough of disillusionment. Agile software has been hammered for some time, and now it's organisational Agile's turn.

Kill the restructure

Submitted by skeptic on Thu, 2019-09-26 04:05

I'm getting grumpy about the use of structural reorgs to chase ”transformation".
They don't work.
They break existing teams.
They damage morale.
They sow confusion.
And they turn one set of siloes into a different set of siloes.
I wrote recently about the dysfunctions of transformation, and restructuring is one of the worst.

Forget the Fullstack

Submitted by skeptic on Sun, 2019-09-15 02:07

Perfect people don't exist.
Start where you are. Work with who you have. Let the teams do "team Tetris" to self assemble into functional units with all the skills they need.

The wonderful free resources from DevOps Forum are the best. Thankyou Gene Kim!

Bringing Humanity to Work

Submitted by skeptic on Sat, 2019-09-14 08:00

Hear us present on the online conference Shine19 on 30th october at 04:00GMT about
Bringing Humanity to Work
logo

Playing a piano is easy

Submitted by skeptic on Sat, 2019-09-14 02:56

Playing the piano is easy.
The keys are in order and easy to reach.
All you do is memorise which keys make what notes, then play them in the order written on the sheet.
- Randall Munroe in his new book How To.

When I tweeted this, and followed up with

    That's a complete set of operational instructions for the piano.

The dysfunctions of transformation

Submitted by skeptic on Fri, 2019-09-13 09:19

There are classic mistakes being made over and over as large organisations try to "do Agile", "implement Agile", or *shudder* "transform". I'm getting passionate about preventing the harm.

The purpose of IT

Submitted by skeptic on Sat, 2019-09-07 06:17

Our purpose is not to write code. Our purpose is to create, deploy and operate a human/machine system that delivers satisfying value, and continues to do so over the expected lifetime of the service it provides. Code is one of the easier parts of that whole.

Fractured Agile

Submitted by skeptic on Mon, 2019-09-02 10:48

Agile seems to go off in many directions. There are multiple flavours of Agile, often driven by one strong personality. Will there ever be a unified vision of Agile quite like there was when the Agile Manifesto was written?
Actually I'm sure there wasn't. I can guess how the conversations went that day. Agile has always been thus, and always will be?

Now we have [last updated 3/9/19]

The work Renaissance

Submitted by skeptic on Sat, 2019-08-31 10:05

As everybody is surely aware by now, big things are afoot in how we think about work and management. Agile has spilled out of IT into the enterprise. Complex systems theory is finally shifting how we think. Safety culture is revealing the value in failure. Less widely known (yet), Open culture is flipping the hierarchy.

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