Diego Pacheco Tech blog

Holacracy is an organization system where authority is distributed with self-organizing groups. I first heard about these ideas back in 2013 through Zappos's book . Culture is delicate and often moves much slower than technology. As generations are changing some values are slowly changing. Even COVID-19 is shaping how we live and do business. Holacracy has interesting properties, IMHO is all about the people, having the right talent might work in almost of forms of management systems, of course, the lots of great engineers don't care about what management systems they are in but others do. Today I want to share a slidecast I made sharing some ideas about Holacracy.

Like we say in Brazil (Todo Carnaval tem seu fim) all carnival has an end. This is the end, my friend. It's the final slidecast on the series. If you did not watch  part 1 and part 2 I highly recommend you do. Part 1and 2 I covered +40 books, 20 each slidecast, and today I will cover +20 more. Total +60 books. Even if you dont agree with all ideas here I recommend you watch them because you will see common patterns and connections between books and might get some insights or reading recommendations. So Let's get started! 

Traditional management often sucks. Main because the focus is on control, time management, and micro-management. Plus, traditional management does not learn and just repeats the same process repeatedly and expects different results. I prefer modern incarnations like Coaches or even Engineering Managers.  I'm aware that Agile Coaching is a bad word in brazil because of Scams, but it does not mean it is a bad thing - It really depends on the people. People are more attached to managers than you can think. People do not know quite companies, they quite they managers. That's why management is a super important element of companies culture. Companies are complex. Complexity is everywhere; at the same often people just game the system rather than have complex and systemical thinking. So if you want to change the culture, you need to change management., Today, I would like to cover some non-obvious aspects that can deliver a better culture and, therefore, better solutions and better m...

Right now, everything is different due to COVID-19. Even before the COVID-19 meetings were often seen as the one tool to fix all sorts of problems. Meetings can have value if you have a clear agenda and people get prepared before the meeting which never happens so meetings tend to bring lots of waste and kill engineering productivity because it becomes flow killer. The reason why meetings are a goto tool for every kind of problem because it's easier, however, the price is high: Affects Engineering productivity because it's an interruption and often things dont get done and you need more meetings. So you might be wondering what we can do about it, well there is plenty of things we can do about but in order for any solution to work we need to have Discipline which is hard, that's why lots of meetings continue to happen. I'm and always was a huge Chat fan. In the past, I used Skype, Atlassian Hipchat, Teams, and Slack for the last 6 years these tools are great because t...

So this is the second video about my thoughts on Estimates. The first video is here if you did not watch it. I end up doing a second video because I realized there was more stuff I want to say and elaborate more like: Estimates not being reliable and liner. Moscow is really helpful to increase the success chance and also small things like XP Simple Design, Metrics, Team Layout, Branching Model, Architecture and so many other things which I cover on this video. So this video is a bit bigger than the first one(8 min) but not that big(12min) so I hope you guys like it.

Kanban is a Lean tool. It's focused on the psychological part of the work. In a nutshell, you manage the system via constraints and you don't manage people. I used kanban a lot in the last 8 years. When I started I was a Software Architect | Coach in not-so-traditional SOA projects.  Today I work a lot with DevOps Engineering and Cloud Computing and I don't work with 2 weeks sprints but with quarters which are 3-months length buffers of work. You might think as a quarter as a super big sprint. There are several different kinds of classes of work like (A) Support for Developers, (B) Tuning, (C) Stress Testing, (D) NoSQL Development, (E) Telemetry and Observability, (F) Distributed Tracking and so on and on. I'm working on CORE team with other architect and DevOps Engineers. For a long time, I was using kanban metrics and sheets pretty religiously. Because I was working with Big Teams(up to 33 people) and multiple teams who had to deliver on time. As more close y...

A long time ago a remember when agile on the early days was something driven by developers - pretty much by XP practitioners. Don`t get me wrong agile is about the customer, and its about making better software and of course mgmt is part of software but agile is not only about mgmt. I`m really not sure when - maybe after PMI embracing Scrum and Jira rises as the ultimate agile tool(not for me :-) ) But today more and more a see less and less engineers going away from agile.  Maybe because they thing agile is about process, tools(jira) and practices(scrum) and thats a manager thing. To be clear agile is way more than scrum. I`m way more into Lean and Kanban than Scrum but i can`t deny i`m seeing this more and more on the market.

Management is all about goals and compliance. It`s a very traditional approach around some ideias that really sounds wrong to me. Management is about CONTROL and make people work around a specific GOAL in the way that you can manage people to archive it. That's great but i dont think thats works anymore now a day. Because people are not bad, and people can learn new skills and you dont need manage the people you need actually managed the system/constraints and other for people not the other way around. I deeply belive in servant leadership ideias, i belive people are great and you should not try to control they, actually you should help they to archive their goals. The Soccer game it`s a great game. If you think though, the coach its not playing, he its a kind of invisible manager, working things on the backstage. Unfortunately most of companies are like the army. So they basically work around the idea that the most valuable thing is not the execution but the decision, that...

SlideCast: Slides: Pick your side from Diego Pacheco