The lizard brain

Submitted by skeptic on Tue, 2017-02-07 00:57

The lizard brain is a colloquial term for the most basic parts of your brain.
We are primal animals. We dont interact with machines in the same way as we interact with humans.

Move from change control to change facilitation

Submitted by skeptic on Mon, 2017-01-30 08:27

ITSM Review quoted me from Pink16 as saying
"Change Management needs to move from Change control to Change facilitation”.
This is referring of course to IT operational Change Management.

A client challenged me as to how.
My answer: One Principle - Shift Left.

You can't improve a cog

Submitted by skeptic on Thu, 2017-01-19 08:45

I was advising somebody who had been tasked with improving a single process. I said that without a systemic improvement of all the processes and the technologies and the people around it, trying to improve one process is like trying to improve one cog in the machine.

ITIL exam market continues to shrink

Submitted by skeptic on Fri, 2017-01-06 23:46

It's not as if too many people really care anymore, but the ITIL market appears to continue to shrink.
I haven't kept an eye on the numbers for a while - having more important things to think about these days with DevOps - but a comment on this blog triggered me to go look again. Yup, still falling.

The IT engineering fallacy

Submitted by skeptic on Tue, 2017-01-03 05:10

There are some fundamental fallacies which have misled IT in the past and one of them is "the engineering fallacy", the false belief that we build IT systems like engineers build bridges.

Merry Christmas from the IT Skeptic

Submitted by skeptic on Sat, 2016-12-24 18:21

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to all my readers and followers.
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I really appreciate you folks. Without your support there wouldn't be any point in this blog going on for over a decade.

Axelos are the Official source of DevOps now?

Submitted by skeptic on Sat, 2016-12-10 21:25

Imagine my surprise to discover at the recent DevOps Enterprise Summit conference that Axelos are now the official source of DevOps.
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The two tribes of DevOps

Submitted by skeptic on Sun, 2016-10-09 01:58

DevOps works to unite Dev and Ops communities to remove the vertical fracture in our IT organisations.
Ironically in the process of doing this we appear to be fracturing on a horizontal line between those oriented towards technology, software and coding, and those oriented towards business, people and practice.

Get out of the way

Submitted by skeptic on Wed, 2016-09-28 22:46

A basic principle of DevOps is for "Necessary Non-Value Work" to get out of the way of Value Work.
© Copyright canstockphoto.com

In the Require-to-Deploy value stream, this NNVW includes

  • security
  • architecture

Railroads don't have a batch size of 1

Submitted by skeptic on Tue, 2016-09-27 04:06

Lean theory tells us that the optimal batch size is 1 [update: no it doesn't. Optimal batch size is often 1, especially in a manufacturing context.]
i.e. we perform each unit of work on demand and it flows independently through the value stream.
Certainly that is the case when you order one of my books which are printed on demand individually and posted directly to you.
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I am still learning about systems and flow. Some of you will know that I am a train nut: I like railways. So it puzzled me to read an article recently in Trains magazine about the trend to larger trains, which have increased by a factor of 100 over the last 150 years.

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