Working Skillfully in Complexity (for VDDD)

For: [Virtual open Space] Systems Thinking and Skillful Interaction 20 September, 2023 Keynote by Jessica Kerr, jessitron.com These are my notes, publishing for people who were there (or anyone who wants to read them) Working Skillfully in Complexity Plan: about half on the technical side of sociotechnical systems, half on social. I can’t define what …

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Accountability for Effective Teams

Accountability is about performance and behavior. Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage Accountability for measurable outcomes is “not the most important kind.” It’s the easy kind. The kind [of accountability] that is more fundamental, important, and difficult is about behavior. Lencioni, The Advantage It’s fundamental because behavior is what we can legitimately ask someone to change. Business …

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Alignment gets expensive. Don’t skimp on it.

Honeycomb has doubled in size since I joined less than 2 years ago. More people means we can do more things at the same time. Both “more people” and “more things at the same time” lead to increased overhead. There’s coordination overhead to get timings right on work that’s independent. Like, to release a feature …

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The Viable Systems Model, and where my team fits

A viable system continues to function in a changing environment. We want our companies—and some teams—to be sustainable this way. How does your team contribute? Does your team have all the components of a viable system… and should it? Stafford Beer (1926-2002) coined the Viable Systems Model to describe what it takes. A Viable System …

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Five Measurements You Should Make and Then Ignore (Plus One to Watch Intently)

Are we succeeding as a software team?Well, if our job were feature delivery, we could look at the parade of JIRA tickets in our “complete” column. That is only part of our job, though.The purpose of a software team is to provide valued capabilities to customers, internal or external. To do that, our software has …

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Every SaaS Integration needs an Upstream Point of Contact

Can you see a pattern in these examples? SendGrid sends emails for you. You provide it with a webhook URL.  It uses the webhook to “call you back” about what happens with those emails, like when they are dropped because your request was invalid. On AWS, you need to listen to an event bus if …

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