The IT Skeptic

The IT Skeptic retires

skeptic — Sun, 29 Dec 2019 23:00:09 +0000

Friends

The IT Skeptic is hanging up his guns and moving on to new adventures. He's retiring.

Shrödinger’s reboot

skeptic — Thu, 12 Dec 2019 07:05:09 +0000

I'm no expert on probability statistics. In fact, I struggled to pass the paper in university. So this is a layman's view from observation. But I think I got a handle on a couple of principles. How's this?

SAFe ain't all bad

skeptic — Thu, 12 Dec 2019 06:33:39 +0000

There's as much heat as light generated by conversations about SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework). I want to share my views, for whatever they're worth. They can be summed up in one sentence: the best day using SAFe is the day you agree you don't need it any more.

Bringing humanity to work: Digital transformation and Industry 4.0

skeptic — Sat, 07 Dec 2019 02:05:41 +0000

Recently I wrote an idealised view of restoring humanity to work.

Imagine bringing humanity to work

skeptic — Sat, 30 Nov 2019 01:32:19 +0000

Imagine a workplace where you can bring your whole authentic self to work: where you don't have to hide your beliefs or your sexuality or your ethics.

Imagine a workplace where the same standards of social interaction apply as anywhere else, where any behaviour that is unacceptable in any other social context is also unacceptable at work, such as shouting, bullying, patronizing.

The Summoner

skeptic — Fri, 29 Nov 2019 23:57:47 +0000

Huddled against the cold she peers out into the night. On a far distant hill, a tiny glimmering light of a fire. She squints until she is sure she has really seen it, and then runs down the track to tell the others

Limitations of the industrial manufacturing paradigm, including Lean and ToC.

skeptic — Wed, 13 Nov 2019 22:44:07 +0000

Be careful how we apply industrial manufacturing paradigms, including Lean and Theory of Constraints(ToC), to IT. Linear stream flow models only work in IT (or, I suspect, manufacturing), at a close scale. Zoom out and they fail us, its not linear any more, not even to an approximation.

I can't get excited about ITIL4

skeptic — Tue, 05 Nov 2019 22:45:15 +0000

I just can't get excited about ITIL4. No, you didn't miss any blog posts: I haven't written anything yet.

The secret to easy organisational change: hacking the org.

skeptic — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 02:41:41 +0000

Our secret is out.

Separating out work and personnel management

skeptic — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 08:16:31 +0000

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.

skeptic — Fri, 11 Oct 2019 22:11:52 +0000

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

skeptic — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 04:05:13 +0000

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

skeptic — Sun, 15 Sep 2019 02:07:16 +0000

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

skeptic — Sat, 14 Sep 2019 08:00:49 +0000

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

Playing a piano is easy

skeptic — Sat, 14 Sep 2019 02:56:42 +0000

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

skeptic — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 09:19:17 +0000

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

skeptic — Sat, 07 Sep 2019 06:17:52 +0000

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

skeptic — Mon, 02 Sep 2019 10:48:32 +0000

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

skeptic — Sat, 31 Aug 2019 10:05:50 +0000

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.

Anybody still visit this blog without being linked to a post from social media?

skeptic — Wed, 28 Aug 2019 13:14:14 +0000