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Learn how making work visible, value stream management, and flow metrics can affect change in your organization.
Clarify team interactions for fast flow using simple sense-making approaches and tools.
Multiple award-winning CTO, researcher, and bestselling author Gene Kim hosts enterprise technology and business leaders.
In the first part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Ron Westrum, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University.
In the first episode of Season 2 of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Admiral John Richardson, who served as Chief of Naval Operations for four years.
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DevOps best practices, case studies, organizational change, ways of working, and the latest thinking affecting business and technology leadership.
Is slowify a real word?
Could right fit help talent discover more meaning and satisfaction at work and help companies find lost productivity?
The values and philosophies that frame the processes, procedures, and practices of DevOps.
This post presents the four key metrics to measure software delivery performance.
October 12, 2021
This post is an excerpt from the paper Accelerating Shared Services: How to Make Shared Services Suck Less by Charlie Betz, Scott Prugh, Erica Morrison, Scott Nasello, Adam Zimman, Damon Edwards, and Randy Shoup (with contributions from Julia Harrison).
When defined and operated well, shared services teams can provide substantial efficiency and leverage to organizations. It is hard to imagine a large organization that does not centralize broadly useful capabilities. They are a legitimate response to specialized problems that require specialist expertise.
When defined or operated poorly, however, shared services can be a source of intense frustration and inefficiency, with a reputation for behaving like silos and for putting would-be customers through burdensome bureaucracy and arbitrary decision-making.
All too often shared services are conceived as a conglomeration of systems and services that market-facing teams have deemed mundane. This can be anything from a feature that is considered commoditized (such as in-app messaging or email service) to a service that is mission critical but is seen as lacking opportunity for new feature development (such as CI or a deployment pipeline). In this scenario the shared services function can sometimes be seen as a “dumping ground” for undesirable work.
Shared services teams are also often born out of a need for deep expertise. While the strong preference of most Agile teams is to have all the skills they need on the team, at scale this proves very challenging. There are many areas in any highly scaled digital organization that call for deep expertise—expertise that can’t always be reduced to APIs. These include skillsets like DBAs (database administrators), security engineers, networking specialists, and infrastructure providers.
At the DevOps Enterprise Forum this year, it was reported that one CIO had, through analysis, determined that twenty-five people were the minimum number needed for a cross-functional product team to be truly viable in that environment—a number that is much larger than the seven to nine people often recommended for a “two-pizza team.”
Many solutions have been proposed and tried for this problem: T-shaped professionals, automation, platform teams, temporary assignments. But the basic issue of professional specialization versus product focus never goes away. As Don Reinertsen says: “Every time someone tells me that they are using a completely autonomous cross-functional team, when I dig deeper I find they have had to put in place a mechanism to create infrequent but quick access to deep expertise.”
Shared services are too often a sore point for DevOps and Agile teams, with a long and well-deserved reputation for bureaucracy, delay, and high-handed behavior. We need a new and more effective approach to shared services. In short, we want shared services to suck less!
Greater success can be found when organizations treat shared services as core to the business—a set of capabilities that enable and optimize the company’s ability to innovate while maintaining stability for existing customers. This paper seeks to present a deeper understanding of this problem and take this conversation to a new level, presenting an improved framework for understanding and guiding, helping scale companies through this problem. Each of the authors of this paper has experienced shared services done well and done poorly, and the purpose of this paper is to outline some of the patterns we have found that lead to successful shared services implementations in our organizations.
There are many reasons why shared services have gained a poor reputation in organizations:
We propose the following overall principles for shared services:
In the full paper, Accelerating Shared Services, we describe eleven patterns for shared service success:
To read the full paper, including details on each of these patterns, please download here.
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