"A dashboard is like the executive summary of a report. We read executive summaries and skip the body of the report if the summary is more or less in line with our expectations. Trouble is, measurement is never exhaustive. It is only when we dive in that we realize what areas may have been missed." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"A project plan is a prediction. It predicts that a team of N people will complete X amount of work by Y date." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"A software team can get severely constrained when a velocity target is imposed on it. Velocity works well as a measurement, not as a target. Targets limit choice of actions. A team may find itself unable to address technical debt if it is constrained by velocity targets. At a certain threshold of constraints, team members lose the sense of empowerment (autonomy)." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"A value stream is a series of activities required to deliver an outcome. The software development value stream may be described as: validate business case, analyze, design, build, test, deploy, learn from usage analytics and other feedback - rinse and repeat." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"Although essential, governance is an activity, not an outcome. This makes it risky to grant autonomy to a pure governance team. Instead, it is better to constitute each area of governance as a community of practice consisting of practitioners from various capability teams." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"[…] an overall green status indicator doesn’t mean anything most of the time. All it says is that the things under measurement seem okay. But there always will be many more things not under measurement. To celebrate green indicators is to ignore the unknowns. […] The tendency to roll up metrics into dashboards promotes ignorance of the real situation on the ground. We forget that we only see what is under measurement. We only act when something is not green." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"Business strategy comes first. IT can be aligned with business provided that business strategy is commonly understood and accepted. Sometimes, this first step itself is a hurdle. Business strategy may exist in the heads of the execs but it may not be articulated or shared beyond vision, mission, and a plan for the year." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"[…] culture cannot be changed directly. It changes as a result of changes to organizational beliefs and rituals." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"Development is a design process. Design processes are generally evaluated by the value they deliver rather than a conformance to plan. Therefore, it makes sense to move away from plan-driven projects and toward value-driven projects. […] The realization that the source code is part of the design, not the product, fundamentally rewires our understanding of software." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"DevOps recognizes the importance of culture. The acronym CAMS (culture, automation, measurement, and sharing) is used to encapsulate its key themes. Culture is acknowledged as all important in making development and IT operations work together effectively. But what is culture in this context? It is not so much about an informal dress code, flexible hours, or a free in-house cafeteria as it is about how decisions are taken, norms of behavior, protocols of communication, and the ways of navigating hierarchy and bureaucracy to get things done." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"Feedback is what makes it iterative; otherwise, it is just mini-waterfall. Merely splitting use cases into stories does not make for iterative development if we wait until all stories are developed before we seek feedback. The point of splitting is to get feedback faster so that it can be incorporated into ongoing development. However, seeking stakeholder/user feedback for small batches of functionality (stories) is often not feasible with formal stage-gate processes. They were conceived with linear flows of large batches in mind." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"Good user stories are expected to be independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, small, and testable (mnemonic INVEST). Good tasks are expected to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-boxed (mnemonic SMART). The key difference is that tasks need not be independent or valuable by themselves." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"Grouping a bunch of related fine-grained metrics into an aggregate metric works better than handling them individually. This is commonly achieved by defining an aggregate metric as a weighted sum of contributory metrics. It is the sort of technique used in credit scoring, insurance risk scoring, or the points system for immigration. Thresholds are then set on the aggregate score to define different categories of eligibility." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"In order to control where a team devotes its energies, all you need to do is to impose a bunch of targets and track progress at regular intervals. For greater control, increase the range of targets and track more frequently. This is called micromanagement and is universally detested by teams. Doing so increases reporting overhead but rarely improves team performance." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"In order to cultivate a culture of accountability, first it is essential to assign it clearly. People ought to clearly know what they are accountable for before they can be held to it. This goes beyond assigning key responsibility areas (KRAs). To be accountable for an outcome, we need authority for making decisions, not just responsibility for execution. It is tempting to refrain from the tricky exercise of explicitly assigning accountability. Executives often hope that their reports will figure it out. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"In the context of an organization, to have autonomy is to be
empowered, not just feel empowered. […] But it does not mean being a lone wolf
or being siloed or cut off from the rest of the organization.
"Language influences thought, tools influence action. Therefore, it matters a lot how we choose our tools. We shape our tooling and access landscape, and thereafter they shape the contours of our collaboration. When we choose a lot of different specialty tools, they in turn nudge us into different specialty groups." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"Rolling up fine-grained metrics to create high-level dashboards puts pressure on teams to keep the fine-grained metrics green even when it might not be the best use of their time." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"Scaling supervision using metrics is one thing; scaling results is quite another. The former doesn’t automatically ensure the latter." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"Self-organizing teams need autonomy. […] Autonomy allows us to act on the opportunity that purpose provides. Mastery then lets us service the opportunity with a degree of excellence. Targets distort purpose, limit autonomy, and disregard mastery." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"Some hierarchy is essential for the effective functioning of an organization. Eliminating hierarchy has the frequent side effect of slowing down decision making and diffusing accountability." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"Strategy is ineffective if it cannot be articulated in terms of day-to-day tradeoffs." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"Teams motivated by targets tend not to take ownership of problems. They attend only to those aspects that affect targets and leave the rest to be picked up by someone else. To some extent, the problem isn’t the target itself but rather the incentive behind the target." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"[…] the practice of continuous integration helps a development team fail-fast in integrating code under development. A corollary of failing fast is to aim for fast feedback. The practice of regularly showcasing (demoing) features under development to product owners and business stakeholders helps them verify whether it is what they asked for and decide whether it is what they really want." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"There is common but flawed notion in enterprise IT circles that maintenance work requires less skill than full-scale development. As a result, project sponsors looking to reduce cost opt for a different team of lower-cost people for maintenance work. This is false economy. It hurts the larger business outcome and reduces IT agility." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"This is what the Agile Manifesto means when it says responding to change over following a plan. To maximize adaptability, it is essential to have good, fast feedback loops. This is why there is so much emphasis on iterative development." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"Whatever way we organize, the unit of organization is a team, and any team can turn into a silo if it acts in an insular manner. Therefore, in a sense, we can’t eliminate silos but only try to design around their side effects." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"When a team is held to targets, it begins to look out for itself. It prioritizes the achievement of its own targets over that of its neighboring teams or parent organizational unit. We know from systems theory that local optima do not necessarily lead to global optimum. On the contrary, a global optimum may call for all subsystems to be at local suboptima." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"[…] when different types of specialists use common tools, techniques, and practices for similar activities, it creates a fertile common ground for cross-functional collaboration." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"When people use different tools for similar activities (e.g., version control, work tracking, documentation), they tend to form groups (camps) around tool usage boundaries. […] The more we are invested in certain tools, the greater the likelihood of deriving a part of our identity from the tool and its ecosystem." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
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