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Understand the unique values and behaviors of a successful organization.
Create visible workflows to achieve well-architected software.
Understand and use meaningful data to measure success.
Integrate and automate quality, security, and compliance into daily work.
An on-demand learning experience from the people who brought you The Phoenix Project, Team Topologies, Accelerate, and more.
Learn how to enhance collaboration and performance in large-scale organizations through Flow Engineering
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.
Exploring the impact of GenAI in our organizations & creating business impact through technology leadership.
DevOps best practices, case studies, organizational change, ways of working, and the latest thinking affecting business and technology leadership.
Just as physical jerk throws our bodies off balance, technological jerk throws our mental models and established workflows into disarray when software changes too abruptly or without proper preparation.
Leaders can help their organizations move from the danger zone to the winning zone by changing how they wire their organization’s social circuitry.
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.
August 3, 2021
Note: This post is an abridged adaptation from Mark Schwartz’s The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy. Get the book to get the full playbook.
Whales, my friends, have a lot of blubber. If you’re going to do battle with a leviathan, you’ll have to trim some whale fat. Law of nature, sorry.
The Razor is the enforcer of bureaucratic parsimony. It’s wielded by us, Knights of Occam, the bureaucratic equivalent to Six Sigma Black Belts. Bureaucracy is a factory whose output is compliance. A good bureaucracy—like a good factory—is one that uses the least effort and lowest cost to produce its product and can produce it fastest.
The Razor strives for minimal viable compliance— meaning the fewest number of constraints consistent with the company’s situation and risk posture—and strives to achieve its desired controls with as little whale bulk as possible. The Razor trims bloated bureaucracy into lean bureaucracy; ponderous whales into sleek and speedy marlin; trolls into trainers. A visit to the Razor provides a shave and a haircut that costs less than two bits and makes a whale spiffy and fun to swim with. This next set of tactics is from the playbook of the Razor.
By all means, look at your value streams and see where bureaucracy is adding to your lead times! Calculate its cost, in lead time and dollars, then find ways to reduce it while still mitigating the same risks and achieving the same results. Keep in mind:
Next, we’ll look at the Way of the Sumo Wrestler…
Mark Schwartz is an iconoclastic CIO and a playful crafter of ideas, an inveterate purveyor of lucubratory prose. He has been an IT leader in organizations small and large, public, private, and nonprofit. As an Enterprise Strategist for Amazon Web Services, he uses his CIO experience to bring strategies to enterprises or enterprises to strategies, and bring both to the cloud. As the CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, he provoked the federal government into adopting Agile and DevOps practices. He is pretty sure that when he was the CIO of Intrax Cultural Exchange he was the first person ever to use business intelligence and supply chain analytics to place au pairs with the right host families. Mark speaks frequently on innovation, bureaucratic implications of DevOps, and using Agile processes in low-trust environments. With a BS in computer science from Yale, a master’s in philosophy from Yale, and an MBA from Wharton, Mark is either an expert on the business value of IT or else he just thinks about it a lot.
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