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Showing posts with the label org

Career Frameworks

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Today career frameworks are a thing, they are pretty popular along with culture handbooks. Career frameworks are an interesting compass no not only to grow up on a company ladder but also to understand what the culture is and how to be effective. Of course, the paper accepts anything and you might write down beautiful things and have a completely different culture in reality. Besides that the fact that your writing down helps to achieve clarity and spread the word. Especially in REMOTE times like we live today where we have little to zero physical contact. Today I want to comment on 3 career frameworks and also see some similarities and opportunities for us to learn.

Holacracy

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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.

Management: The non-obvious II

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This is the second post on the series of management the non-obvious. I highly recommend you check out the first post . For the first post, I shared +20 books which was the base of the ideas of the first slidecast. This is the second slidecast. In this second slidecast, we will continue covering some non-traditional ideas and I will recommend +20 books again. Books are portals to other dimensions. We have several cognitive biases in our brains that work against us. We also live in a world that the bad things are repeat over and over and the good things are faiding. So it's really important to spot and think about it. Often we think we have all the answers and just need to execute something, is that so? They allow us to see things we were not seeing before. So I hope you guys like it. Let's get started.

Nine Lies about Work

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This is a pretty interesting book. I really love this kind of book where the author challenges the common sense and traditionally established truths that are not so true actually. Work is something we all do and I often think differently about it. Nine Lies about work sound arrogant but actually is not. The book is full of examples and scientific studies and argues very well on the spot. We are living a global pandemic(COVI-19) and that changed all our lives, that shows how fragile we can be. I personally was always into Lean/Agile and never was a fan of traditional management culture. So buckle up this book might shake up you a lot since will challenge traditional things like People to need Feedback. I often like feedback and worked a long time(~11 years) living strong and daily feedback however even that being a strong truth for me, the author managed to show me a different point of view(wit studies of course) and I still like feedback and strong feedback cultures but I see there are...

Attention Economy

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Social media is about attention. Real-time chat apps like Messenger, Whatsapp, slack are about attention. 101 meetings are about attention. We live in an attention economy. Everybody whats a time-share of you. A long time ago I disable ALL notifications from Slack, Skype, Whatsapp, Facebook(is closed most of the time of my day) and that is one of the best things you can do too. Not only for your mental health but also to put you in control of your time and therefore your happiness. Interruption is the ultimate killer of deep and meaningful work. However, we also need attention and we might need positive attention much more than feedback(Nine Lies about work).  Humans' attention is a very scarce commodity. I'm not judging anyone: Some people cannot read articles bigger than 5min or videos bigger than 10min. Not for accident Twitter originally had a limit of 140 chars(I miss that :-) ). Attention economy is about information management which threatens human attention as a resourc...

Why Digital Transformations Fail?

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Around 2015 there was a huge fuss about Digital Transformation. 70% of all Digital transformations fail(According to Tony Saldanha ).  For sure, you are thinking, this is because of the lack of proper Talent Pool, or wrong technology choices. Fore sure that things matter a lot, but surprisingly the number #1 problem is lack of discipline. Lack of discipline in Defining and executing the right steps. IMHO lack if discipline is also the issue of why hard things dont get done or executed. To define and execute the right steps, you need to have VISION and know what you are doing and what problems you are fixing. If you dont understand the problems you are fixing, how do you know you are fixing the right ones? How do you know you are doing the right things? Well, often, companies don't know, or they think they know.  99.999999% of aircraft takeoffs and landings  are successful  compared with only 30% success in digital transformation initiatives. 

The need for Slack

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So this is not a post about Slack(IRC/Chat application) - there is nothing about instant group messaging here. Slack also means LOOSE which is the opposite of tight. We all know Debit as bad. We all know Debit slows down execution and increases maintained cost. So why do we still suffer too much about it? IMHO there are several reasons that go from Bad management, Lack of Vision, Poor Tech Talent Pool, Lack of Software Ownership and Culture. Recently I finish Upstream from Dan Heath, which is an amazing book about product discovery but also about Software Architecture and Team Organization(Because both are the same :-) ). Dan has other amazing books like Switch . Which I highly recommend it. 

AI and the Future

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AI is here to stay. From recommendations to what book read next or what movie or tv show watch next to AI Art generated frames to Self-Driving cars. AI is a powerful technology that we do not master yet. It will bring changes for us as mankind which I'm not sure if we are ready for them. Currently, we have problems understanding WHY ai did something and debug and understand why some outcome happened. This not only is problematic to fight biases but also because we will be doing more complicated things with AI. Today I want to share a simple and short slidecast I made to get you thinking about this. This Slidecast was highly inspired by the books: Life 3.0 and HomoDeus . I also recommend you check out this channel Future of Life Institute and Beneficial AI Panel  and also Sam Harris TED Talk . 

Central and Unique Platform teams

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DevOps it's a mindset, Skillset and it's not a Department. It's very common to see in the technology industry Centralized and Unique DevOps/Platform Teams. IMHO we are still not there. Most companies are still catching up on AWS and DevOps Engineering skills such as (Networking, Terraform, Observability, OS/Linux, etc...).  So DevOps centralized teams tend to be "Gate Keepers" for good practices and hygiene and several times cost zealots. That's is fine and has value, dont get me wrong. However several times unique and centrlized teams are just a pure form of a bottleneck. AWS has great infrastructure and tons of purpose-built services, I would argue most of the time you dont need to build anything in front of it. Using AWS directly could be coupling but as long as you use open APIs you should be fine. Several years ago I use to be bottered by coupling solution with ORACLE and with AWS the coupling is much bigger, not sure if any company would ever leave AWS, ...

Business Agility are we back to CMMI?

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Agile is around for at least +20 years. However, one big complaint was "how can we scale agile" or "how we go beyond teams". You might consider business agility as the 3rd wave of agile.  But is really hat the case? The world changed a lot in the last +20 years there are many other things to change in the next years. COVID-19 amplified lots of the issues that was already in place.  It's really business agility something entirely new or just an aggregation of previous movements, practices, and values? Business Agility is a hot topic right now, lots of people talking about, very few really doing it. It's hard to get real agile teams nowadays, imagine whole orgs being agile, even harder. IMHO to make the org agile is super hard, however, some of the reflections that business agility is proposing sounds right in the sense we might be asking these questions anyway. 

Productive Disagreement

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Building products(software) is hard. There are so many things that can go wrong. At Scale, everything becomes more laborious. More people, more coordination needed, more things that can go wrong and more pieces and more dependencies. To scale, we create team structure and software, often in the form of SOA Services. Any architecture or Design should survive a set of hard questions; otherwise, the idea or solution might not be good enough. Having people thinking into different dimensions, with varying points of view and various schools of touch, would create disagreement with could be an excellent and healthy thing. However, not always thats is the case.

IT Good and Bad Spots

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Everything in life has good an bad things - there is no just win model - for sure there are things that are better than others but trade-offs will always exist. What's the greatest things around IT? There are several ones. The more I think I got into the *Framework Dilema* so what's the framework Dilema? It means as more as one constraint make it stronger it's also what make you weeak.  Let's say flexibility its a strong advantage it also be the source of the weakness - this is the duality I'm talking about.

Driving fear out through passion and patience

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If you want do something why dont you do? Most because there is fear around your, sometimes this fear is real other is not, in business fear will always happen and for some stuff you do you always will need to be careful. Some organizations or systems are more complex and political tham other but you need be very careful because sometimes things are not impossible as we think they are. Is easy to see things as worst as they are because we fell safe this way. So how we overcome fear? For me is a matter of passion and patience, first of all you need to love what you do otherwise you wont be able to drive any change, secondly still talking about you passion you need to be yourself.

Why Management does not work on Agile?

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Today everybody talks about agile, yeah agile is mainstream. Agile become "Management", scrum is better than waterfall but things are not working as they should. I`m not staying you not need management. As you grown into a complex structure you will need coordination, costs control, and management is need as you get something bigger and complex. But in order to get it right you need realize when and where you fit management. People talk a lot about scaling agile and i think is funny so little is about engineering. People talk about multiples teams, multiple Product owners, multiple work streams, multiple timezones and cultures but where is the engineering? Deming(The Big mind behind Lean) talk a lot about psychology and the ability to understand systems and they nature.  Go Google you will lots of things talking about teams and so little talking about stuff like: Culture, Engineering practices, software architecture(real one, not power points) and principles.

Leadership, Coaching and Mentoring are not Roles

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Today Coaching, Mentoring and Leadership are hot topics everybody is talking about this. Looks like everybody wants to be a Coach/Mentor/Leader but i not sure if people really want do this. This sounds wrong to me, as a Coach / mentor and Leader could sound suspicious say something like that but for me there is a different of letting this things emerge and happen naturally rather than make this as ROLES and try to grow people on this. I dont belive much in this generic roles, i belive in professions i think you can be specialized and do great stuff but to todo that you need a FIELD generic implementations of this things sounds to me like buzzwords trying to reach out people with something new.