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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »