A newsletter that started as a personal learning and getting-in-touch project by Ivan Krnic grew into a sociotechnical newsletter covering topics of technical excellence, organizational improvements, and productivity.
Single-Threaded Leaders
Why are some organizations better than others in innovating and running initiatives?
With knowledge, information, and technology equally available to all, we (generally) can’t say that some organizations are at an unfair advantage. Should we look for the difference somewhere else? For example, in their ability to execute.
The greatest enemy of delivery is the lack of focus. There are just too many things happening around us! Smart organizations use lean portfolio management to focus. High-performing ones insist on even stronger (laser-sharp!) focus.
High-performing organizations know what they want. They recognize strategic initiatives and assign them a Single-Threaded Leader. STL is all about focus. It is a person fully dedicated and accountable for delivering an initiative end-to-end. STL is relieved from everything that is not related to the initiative and has full autonomy along the whole end-to-end delivery process to do what it takes to reach the goal.
Not everything that happens in the organization needs an STL. STLs are expensive. But high-performing organizations know what is important to them and no price is high to get there. Such initiatives get their STL.
Because, as one wise man(?) said…
Interview of the Month
Going DevOps with Scott Prugh
Scott Prugh is CTO at CSG International and one of the people I admire a lot for his perseverance and dedication in making a 35-yo large enterprise embrace modern ways of working. He is an active member of the DevOps community and a member of the DevOps Enterprise Summit conference programming committee. We had a great conversation about their DevOps transformation at CSG. Folks at large enterprise organizations – don’t miss this!
Show notes:
– DevOps Portfolio Management slides
– Scott recommends: Kill it With Fire by Marianne Bellotti, John Cutler, Melissa Perri
– Scott’s weekly DevOps Digest
Would you like your new hires to deploy to production on Day 1?
Would you like to be like Etsy?
Kustodian tackles the eternal problem of developer onboarding and environment configuration by provisioning and managing roles and permissions to digital assets in all systems that support software development lifecycle.
Kustodian enables you to hit the ground running on Day 1.
Hand picked
Compliance in a DevOps Culture – Large organizations often have problems incorporating compliance procedures into the everyday software delivery process. Despite all the automation we have today, it seems that compliance still relies on manual and error-prone checks. Manual compliance can work well for small organizations, but large ones need to turn to methods that scale. Carl Nygard from Thoughtworks describes several patterns to incorporate compliance at scale.
Are You Sure You Want to Use OKRs? – OKRs are modern-day sirens – beautiful but dangerous creatures, who lured nearby sailors with their enchanting music and singing voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island. So do OKRs initially attract with their simplicity but hit hard once you start implementing them. With more and more organizations reaching out to OKRs as a management method, it’s becoming clear that there’s no single, universally accepted OKR practice and that makes for a daunting implementation. There is hope, however, if we stick to some key principles and Christina Wodtke is a master at laying them out.
Shades of DevOps – Related Job titles – With DevOps being around for more than a decade, many titles and roles emerged in an attempt to better describe the work, but also to piggyback on the hype that some buzzwords are generating recently. After all, a cool title equals more applicants for the organization and more compensation for people… one would say it’s a win-win. Patrick Debois gives his view on the current State of DevOps Titles and Roles @Patrick – seriously, I think we should make this report a thing and publish it annually. The sodtar.com domain is available!
The Quest for Low-Code: 9 paths, some of which actually work – The ever-increasing need for faster application delivery combined with a shortage of software engineers brought once again the focus on low code application development. Gregor Hohpe summarizes what “low code” really means and analyzes 9 approaches to reduce the amount of code together with their trade-offs.
DevStream – Folks at Merico launched DevStream, an open source tool giving you the power to define your DevOps toolchain in a simple human-readable YAML config file, and in one single command, launch and automate your whole toolchain and workflow.
Read with us
A Radical Enterprise: Pioneering the Future of High-Performing Organizations
Matt K. Parker breaks down the counterintuitive ideas behind the success of 13 of the fastest growing and most competitive organizations in the world—including Haier (top home appliances brand), W.L. Gore (makers of Gore-Tex), and Morning Star (largest tomato processor in the world).
What connects them all is that they’re radically collaborative, which means they adhere to four imperatives: team autonomy, managerial devolution, deficiency gratification, and candid vulnerability.
QED 2022 conference
In 2020, we skipped a beat…
In 2021, we rebounded with online QEDx conference.
In 2022, we’re back in Zadar for another live QED conference!
Follow us for more info at qed.croz.net. At this time, I’d just like to give you a sneak peek that our keynote speaker will be Heidi Helfand and we’ll talk about Dynamic Reteaming as a way to future-proof your organization!
Header photo by Majestic Lukas on Unsplash
