So, you’re in an organization, running up against bureaucratic impediments when you try to do what you’re pretty sure is the right thing. Perhaps you’re leading a digital transformation and your company’s bureaucracy is resisting change, fighting to lock in ways of doing things that belong to the days before the Paleolithic era. You’re up against a vast leviathan of a bureaucracy. What should you do? Like many business and technology authors, I’m going to tell you a bunch of stuff based on my … [Read more...]
How to Fix Bureaucracy
This post is an excerpt from Mark Schwartz's The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy. There are three things we must do to eliminate bureaucracy’s Kafkaesque aspects. We must make it lean by removing waste and shrinking lead times. We must make it capable of learning; that is, changing as the environment changes and as better ways are found to accomplish goals. And we must make it enabling—that is, helpful as a way to get things done rather than a no-saying, gatekeeping, troll-controlled … [Read more...]
The IT Leader’s Place in the Business
This post was is an excerpt from the book A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility by Mark Schwartz. In the Agile world, senior IT leadership, and the CIO in particular, must look at their jobs in a new way if they want to secure a seat at the table. A few of the critical characteristics of the new IT leadership role include: Driver of Outcomes Manager of Uncertainty Steward of Assets Contributor Influencer and Salesperson Orchestrator of Chaos Enabler Impediment … [Read more...]
The Good and The Bad of Bureaucracy
This post is adapted from Mark Schwartz's The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy: Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler. In a previous post I revealed how IT is the biggest, baddest bureaucrat on the block. But to overcome bureaucracy, we need to separate those of its aspects that are problematic from those that are not, and focus our efforts on the former. We must disengage from the metaphysical pathos and reengage in a particular way. Let's now identify the … [Read more...]
Announcing The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy
I’m excited to announce the publication of my fourth book, The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy: Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler. Despite the whimsical title, it’s about a critical concern of enterprises transitioning to the cloud and trying to thrive in the digital economy. From my meetings with enterprise AWS customers, I know that bureaucracy is often an impediment to digital transformation. It acts to slow down or prevent innovation and adaptation. It … [Read more...]
Making Bureaucracy Lean, Learning and Enabling
This post is a transcript of Mark Schwartz's DevOps Enterprise Summit- London 2020 presentation. Hi everyone. My name is Mark Schwartz. I'm an enterprise strategist with Amazon Web Services. I think I've spoken at every one of these DevOps Enterprise Summits since 2014, so I hope you're not getting tired of me yet. I think some of you might also have read one or more of my books. There's The Art of Business Value, A Seat at the Table, and War and Peace and IT. And the exciting … [Read more...]
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 find it imposed on us. Your password, we say, must be in a format that guarantees you’ll never remember it, and you must change it every few … [Read more...]
Three Innovative Funding Models to Enhance DevOps
Adapted from War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age by Mark Schwartz. The traditional project plan tries to manage risks by itemizing them in a register and proposing a mitigation plan for each one. Risks are mitigated to the extent necessary to bring the plan back into line—in other words, to adjust the initiative so the initial business case and plan are maintained. But the uncertainties in the IT domain go deeper—it might be that … [Read more...]
The 3 Real Risks Every Project Manager Should Focus On
Adapted from War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age by Mark Schwartz. It turns out that people are pretty terrible at assessing probabilities and risk. In my last book, A Seat at the Table, I cited several examples to make this point—examples that I love because even knowing the right answer I still can’t convince myself it is right. The first example had to do with the TV game show Let’s Make a Deal, in which the contestant is asked … [Read more...]
Quick Guide to DevOps for the Non-IT Business Leader
Adapted from War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age by Mark Schwartz. What is DevOps 1) Small Teams of T-Shaped People DevOps is practiced in small teams, say five to nine people. Small teams can communicate among themselves face-to-face, thereby avoiding the overhead of passing around and perfecting documents. Each team is cross-functional, with skills in software development, testing, infrastructure engineering, operations, and … [Read more...]
