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Making Bureaucracy Lean, Learning and Enabling
The first point that I try to make is that your bureaucracy is natural. It’s something we do all the time. People are really good at creating bureaucracy, and it’s around us more than we think. We just don’t necessarily notice it because it’s not getting in our way. Second point then is it actually is in our way, quite a lot. And it’s in our way in the most frustrating way possible. Right? And I don’t really have to tell you that, that’s not the surprising part of the book. Third thing, third point I like to make is that it’s not really bureaucracy itself that frustrates us. I’ve narrowed it down to three things about bureaucracy that are really troubling. And those three things don’t necessarily need to be part of bureaucracy.
Managing People, Not Resources in a DevOps Enterprise
This post is adapted from the book DevOps for the Modern Enterprise by Mirco Hering. Some people react allergically when you call people resources and talk about managing resources. While not exactly allergic, I agree with the underlying sentiment. A resource is something you can manage without much tailoring; you can treat one bag of […]
IT: The Biggest, Baddest Bureaucrats
This post is an excerpt of Mark Schwartz’s The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy: Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler. IT Bureaucracy: Not Fooling Anyone Among the biggest, baddest, bullyingest bureaucrats in a large enterprise are the IT folks. Yes, us, the very IT folks who so hate bureaucracy when we […]
Three Innovative Funding Models to Enhance DevOps
We should instead take advantage of all the options that new IT approaches present. If we can buy additional information to reduce the risk of our investment decision, if we have the choice of stopping an initiative that has already returned sufficient value . . . well, why not? It would be irresponsible to pretend that we can make long-range, point-in-time decisions despite the uncertainty in our environment. We now have the option of staging investments, learning as we go, and adjusting plans. And if we insist on sticking to a plan that we made early—before the initiative started and when we had the least available information—then we’ll likely miss out.
