It’s one of those words that come back over and over again in context of modern delivery approaches and organizational structures. The word seems common enough to mean approximately the same in people’s minds, however I have found that it is often confused for something else. According to Merriamm-Webster, autonomy is the quality or state of being self-governing. This distinguishes it from the term empowerment, which is the state of being empowered to do something. In other words, autonomy is an internal property - it comes from within -, while empowerment comes from someone’s approval.
Autonomous teams make their own decisions, they do it based on their objectives and all the relevant information they have available about the world around them. Empowered teams also are told to do exactly that. However, the scope of their decision making power - sometimes explicit, more often implicit - limits their autonomy significantly and can even shrink should a decision be made that does not align...
In context of our attendance at Collision last month, we published a quick survey to validate some of our assumptions about Socrates. While the survey is still open for everyone to provide us with feedback, this post summarizes the results of the first respondents.
When working with some of our larger customers we frequently run into common barriers to change. Change is difficult and, no matter how often we say it, there is no silver bullet for how to get there. However, we can say there are commonalities in approaches, things we’d look for and actions we’d take in response to those findings. When we look at the delivery of technology within organizations we often come across the barriers within how the teams are organised but even more frequently, how the organization is working with technology is the bigger barrier. Developing powerful roadmaps is valuable and greatly helps with generating alignment and a common vision.
In my last post I spoke to blame culture. In this post I’m going to talk through the second of three common organizational problems we encounter, not looking at the entire system, and how attaining visibility will help you overcome barriers to better achieve your business outcomes.
When Chris Chapman, a friend and colleague, referred to an article on LinkedIn to explain his growing disinterest in Open Space conferences, I started writing a quick reply. The quick reply soon outgrew the limitations for a LinkedIn response and therefore ended up as this blog post.
First of all: I love Open Spaces, absolutely love them. Second, it’s a shame there’s not more real ones…
Our ultimate objective is to help our customers be successful. We have strong opinions on what successful companies look like and what is important for an organizational culture to support sustainable success, but that is a topic for another time. For the technology organizations or departments we work with, our objective loosely translates to
“help our customers get the biggest return of their IT investment”
Many organizations put their faith in Agile and DevOps practices to achieve this, but fail to get the results they are hoping for.
When working with some of our larger customers we frequently run into common barriers to change. Change is difficult and, no matter how often we say it, there is no silver bullet for how to get there. However, we can say there are commonalities in approaches, things we’d look for and actions we’d take in response to those findings. When we look at the delivery of IT capabilities within organizations, we often come across the barriers caused by how the teams are organized and, even more frequently, how the organization is working with technology. Developing powerful roadmaps is valuable and greatly helps with generating alignment and a common vision.
In this post I am going to talk through the first of three common organizational problems we encounter and ways to overcome them to better achieve your desired business outcomes. The first of these is called blame culture…
Last year I was invited to help the Queen’s Hyperloop Design Team improve their chances in the SpaceX competition. They had just been informed that they did not make it into the last round of the competition, so we focused on setting up the team for success going forward.