organisations

A collection of 29 posts

organisations

Specificity

I've become that annoying person who asks, "you say it takes a long time - but how long exactly? Which part consumes the most time? How did you measure?" There's a reason. For the past year or so I've been working at a seed stage startup, which is the earliest

organisations

Steak and Salami

Ever had the feeling you're working constantly and getting nowhere? Specifically, the one where you've got a dozen things to do and none of them are getting done? Did you find that the more you worked, the worse the problem seemed to get? This is something endemic to the modern,

agile

Servant Leader, Helicopter Parent

Why is developing software so slow now? Provocative statement, so let's unpick. Maybe I'm getting more impatient as I get older, but the pace of modern software development feels glacial. Honestly, why do simple app features or new API endpoints swallow half a team for three or four weeks at

teams

Mentoring, not hiring: The Reality

Semi-anonymous Internet idiots like me love telling you all these things you should be doing about team structure, organisational approach and Really Exciting Technology but we're often a bit light on what happens when you actually do these things, and your self organising consensus driven team hits the switch for

agile

Methodology? What Methodology?

I think I'm getting kind of post-methodology in my thinking. I don't really care what it is or what it's called, but I do care that it facilitates three critical things

teams

How to really identify a 10x developer

The sudden trending of "hashtag 10x developer" worries me. It worries me because it's not really about 10x performance, at least most of the time I've seen it. Instead, it tends to bundle two often overlapping movements which are unrelated to performance.

agile

Agility and the power of No

One of the nice things for me about writing is I get to go back to my old articles every once in a while and see where my viewpoint has matured, where it's changed...

organisations

The 10x Developer and You

I'm in the mood for sarcastic graphs. I think (I hope) that the idea of the "10x" developer is not an astonishingly new and radical one. People in the upper quartile of the profession are not proportionately better than those in the bottom quartile, they're orders of magnitude better. But

teams

Thoughts on Interviewing

I think I'm destined to always be an iconoclast when it comes to interviews. Not quite so much as the days when "let's ask programmers some questions about programming" was a controversial idea, but I still find that when I introduce people to the way I do things they're sceptical

teams

Thoughts on team leadership and metrics

I realise that in four or so years of this site I've never talked properly about team leadership, which is a bit of an omission given how much time I've devoted to organisational design and how closely the two are related. I'm going to split this across a few articles

organisations

Two Transformation Questions

What exactly is a transformation? Is it "go to the cloud" or "be Agile" or "containerise the things"? Despite the number of organisations which state those as their goals, I'd say it isn't. Those examples are merely means to an end. They're often a part of transformation, but they're not

teams

Performance Reviews

I had an interesting conversation last night about that old bugbear, the annual performance review. No matter how many well-meaning attempts have been made with SMART targets or peer review systems, every annual review I've had or given during my professional career has gone something like this: * Here are a

organisations

Bias for action and agility

What has linked all of the high-performing teams and organisations I've worked for or with? That title is a bit of a clue: it's a bias for action. What this means is they believe the way to solve a problem or to improve things is to do something. A team

devops Featured

DevOps: What I Learnt From A Nightmare Journey

I've just finished what was a very rough journey into a fully-automated deployment infrastructure at a large scale. At times it felt more like I was in a bizarre far-future version of a Victorian penny dreadful, complete with roguish charlatans and cliff-hanger disasters. But we battled through it all and

planning

Planning isn't free

I've got a confession to make: I secretly enjoy rewriting code when requirements change. I get to think again about what I was doing and my assumptions, tidy up the lingering technical debt, make a few performance optimisations and abstract things a little bit so I don't have to worry

organisations

ln(t): The startup growth problem

Here's an article that I found in my backlog, and realised I never got round to publishing. When I wrote it I was thinking predominately about startups, but on reflection there's a lot of relevance to organisations of any size; particularly ones that are going through a lot of change,

organisations

Firefighting

Firefighting is one of the biggest and most common causes of lost productivity and morale in software development. It usually manifests as developers being pulled off their project to urgently fix something - the live site is spewing 500 errors, there's a button in the wrong place, or a senior

organisations

Why enterprise companies are sinking in the flood

There's a question enterprise companies ask about startups. "How are we being beaten by ten guys in a loft in Shoreditch? We've got so many more resources than they have!" And more often than not when challenged they double down on more - more planning, more market research, more project

agile

Waste redux

A conversation today reminded me of my musings about waste [http://www.mattkimber.co.uk/waste/] from a couple of months ago. The context being that Scrum is misunderstood more often than it's understood, the relatively broad statements of the Agile Manifesto are easily abused to claim whatever you're currently

agile

Agile transformation: The Low

A few months into any company's journey towards agile development I often see a point which I call the Low. This is where you've brought in a few experts, and done a few of the things they've said... but nothing seems to have improved and now people are wandering round

organisations

Bimodal IT isn't anything to aspire to

Bimodal IT is a term created by analysis form Gartner, to describe an increasingly common pattern in enterprise development. It's where you have one part of the organisation working in a very traditional, governance-focused manner using lots of process charts, documents and explicit signoff, and one part working in a

organisations

Waste

What's the difference between a merely good Scrum organisation and a great one? The answer is waste. Waste in a Scrum context is loosely defined as any activity which does not result in something the customer uses. At its most obvious we're talking things like TPS reports and bikeshedding, but

organisations Featured

Be careful with "Modern Agile".

I have a problem with a lot of the recent advice suggesting firms looking to adopt agile practices should eschew the stand-ups, estimations and fixed iterations of Scrum. Which is strange as a lot of that advice is coming from respected, experienced Scrum practitioners. However, I think what's happening is

organisations

Updating the Joel Test for the modern world

Hands up who remembers the Joel Test [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html]? It might take some remembering, because it's a shade over 15 years old now - pre-dating the Agile Manifesto. For those of you who don't, Joel's writing on software was some of the earliest, "actually, this

agile

Avoiding nightmare releases

Something I've seen a lot of supposedly Agile teams fail with is releases at the end of a project. Everything up to that point ticks along nicely, but the final sprint is a monstrous combination of time extensions, shifting scope, last-minute changes and unexpected problems. I've seen all sorts of