The world changed on June 26, 2018. It happened quietly. Few people even noticed. But that was the day that, after more than a century, General Electric, the last original member of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, was removed from the index. GE was one of just a dozen firms that Charles Dow included in his list in 1896. The company appeared alongside giants such as American Tobacco, American Sugar Refining Company, and Tennessee Coal and Iron, companies that dominated what Carlota Perez, an … [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...]
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 sand like the next bag of sand when it comes to making dikes. With people, that is never true. We have probably all been planning for projects and … [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 to choose … [Read more...]
24 Key Capabilities to Drive Improvement in Software Delivery
This post is adapted from an excerpt of Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim. Our research, based on four years of the State of DevOps Report, has uncovered 24 key capabilities that drive improvements in software delivery performance in a statistically significant way. The book Accelerate details these findings. This post provides you with a handy list of these capabilities. We have classified these capabilities into five categories. Within each category, the … [Read more...]
Accountability: Leaders are Accountable Too
This is a transcript of episode 126 of the Troubleshooting Agile podcast with Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel. Coming to the final chapter of Agile Conversations, we look at how leaders can not only provide accountability for others, but be accountable themselves, including stories from the early days of agile and from today’s clients. So this is our last in the series of podcasts about the book. We’re up to the final chapter of the book. As always in the series, we’re not going to recap … [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...]
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