This post is an excerpt from A Radical Enterprise: Pioneering the Future of High Performing Organizations by Matt K. Parker, coming February 2022. It’s summer 2021. Vaccinations to the COVID-19 virus have already reached a majority of American adults. Summer camps have reopened; schools are preparing for full, in-person enrollment in the fall; and businesses and governments are heralding a “return to normal.” Yet a quick glance at the articles of any major American news outlet paints a … [Read more...]
VOICE: Applying an Agile Mindset to Organizational Agility
This post is an excerpt from Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility by Jonathan Smart, with Zsolt Berend, Myles Ogilvie, and Simon Rohrer. Taking a one-size-fits-all approach does not optimize outcomes for the infinite unique contexts in organized human endeavor. Instead, find your unique VOICE and use it. You Have a Unique VOICE: Use It The alternative to imposing one set of prescriptive practices across an organization without considering the many unique … [Read more...]
The New IT Workforce: Harnessing the Power of Community
This post is adapted from A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility. Accompanying our transition to an Agile IT world, and subtler in its implications, has been the rise of community as a way of practicing IT. This change is due in large part to the rise of open source, but can also be traced to the demographics and inclinations of today’s emerging workforce, as well as to the interdependence of participants in a DevOps model. A successful business can harness this community … [Read more...]
ASREDS Learning Loop
Humans are tribal. We need to belong to groups. But this instinct to belong is also an instinct to exclude. Besides the positive benefits of these social structures, they all share some undesired antipatterns and bubble effects, including: Silo Mentality: people and teams within the bubble want to protect their information, not share it with others in the same company. Limited Discoverability: learnings, knowledge, and information outside the bubble cannot be reached and discovery is limited … [Read more...]
Announcing The DevOps Handbook Second Edition
We're delighted to announce that over the last year we've been hard at work updating the iconic The DevOps Handbook! Originally written over the span of five years, authors Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John Willis created the go-to guide for embarking on a DevOps transformation in any industry. Since the original publication in 2016, the book has gone on to sell more than 250,000 copies and be translated into 11 languages. As the five year anniversary approached, we decided it was … [Read more...]
Test-Driven Development for People: The Art of Conversation
This post is an abridged excerpt from Agile Conversations: Transform Your Conversations, Transform Your Culture. In his book, Kent Beck says that Test-Driven Development (TDD), the practice of writing a test concurrently with the code it exercises, gives him “a sense of comfort and intimacy.” That is exactly the feeling we want you to have during the Trust Conversation, and the tool to help you achieve it is the Ladder of Inference, another concept from Chris Argyris and colleagues in the book … [Read more...]
Announcing New Book from David Anderson
IT Revolution is excited to announced the acquisition of a new book from technology leader David Anderson. Technology is moving faster than ever, and today's business leaders need the ability to experiment and maximize outcomes from their technology investment. An effective engineering function is critical and must fully align with business goals. Well architected systems evolve quickly, perform well and keep maintenance costs down. The book will offer a solution to help businesses align … [Read more...]
Playbook to Bust Bureaucracy
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...]
OKRs & DevOps: From Micromanagement Misery to Finding Flow
Many organizations are having trouble rolling out OKRs or objectives and key results, especially when top leaders overreach into the planning process using OKRs to bludgeon their favorite project or feature into the plan. Dr. Mik Kersten, Founder and CEO of Tasktop, talked at the recent DevOps Enterprise Summit about his seven years of experience using OKRs and what he's seen go right and wrong in large complex organizations. You can watch his full presentation here. I've now had eight years of … [Read more...]
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