Posts

Over the past few months the tech industry has been going through the shock and awe of corporate downsizing that occurs when the economy feels like its about to enter a recession. Big Tech is making layoff after layoff, typically around 10% of the workforce and those are the ones we know about. Many tech companies (and others) will start following suit, even if not as publicly, as the market shrinks and spending slows with companies trying to save cash and preserve profits. Capitalism in many ways sucks! ...

In Aug 2021 I wrote my original post describing my knowledge management and productivity workflow, including the various tools I’d stitched together and some of the challenges I was having. Over a year on and I’ve been making some more significant changes to that tooling and as 2022 comes to a close I thought I would look back on that original post and reflect on what I’ve changed, fixed and learnt along the way. ...

Intro (what even is it?!) I have been a developer and a DevOps engineer (or whatever the latest title is now) for most of my career and I like my systems to be reliable and well architected. I like being confident that when the unexpected happens, and it always does, that the systems that I am responsible for can handle it and not wake me up at 2am. When I talk to developers, I’m often talking about testing and the testing pyramid - we all know it’s value and the positive investment that it is. The more testing of our systems we have the earlier we see bugs, the more reliable the application. It’s a fairly simple statement but its still worth reiterating because of how easy is it to neglect in fast-moving customer/feature driven teams. ...

In the first two parts of this series, I talked about the problem space of mixed operating models in an organisation, why it exists and how to prepare for it. In this post I want to talk about the most important and often most challenging element of operating mixed operating models within an organisation: the cultural change. Any transition of working practices requires a corresponding and iterative process of empathetic change management, where with every modification and iteration, context is given for the changes, conversations are had with those who might be effected and (unlike many corporate change management initiatives) the process includes the input of those on the front-line of the changes. ...

In the first post on Mixed Operating Models I discussed that each application in your landscape, both custom built and third-party will need a different type of operating model and using wardley mapping to map that landscape will give the context of which model is appropriate and at what time. Transitioning between models won’t be easy and requires both technical and cultural changes to be successful. In this post, I will talk about the technical aspects that act as a foundation to any operating model change and cultural shift. ...

This month I wanted to start discussing a topic that has been going around and around in circles of conversation and thoughts for several years now - mixed operating models in IT organisations. There is a lot of ground to cover so stick with me over the next couple of posts and I’ll show you how and why this comes about and what we can do about it. The Problem One of the most challenging aspects of operating IT systems in large enterprise organisations is that there is a complex web of applications, data and infrastructure of varying ages and levels of support. At one end of the spectrum there are homegrown applications supported by agile development teams releasing every two weeks (or more often - wooo!) and then at the other end there are big clunky corporate applications that support all the revenue and all the processes that get the job done day-to-day. One problem I’ve seen in organisations is process and culture that treats both of these applications (and everything in between) the same way. ...

I started writing again in order to get some of those 1:1 conversations and email threads out into the public where some of the conversations, learning and titbits of information can be useful to others. On that same theme I wanted to write down some of those learnings I’ve had building teams over the past 5 years. Grow mentors, coaches and champions This is something I’ve had learn as my teams have grown. When your team is small you are the mentor, the coach and the champion all rolled into one and that’s ok because with less than 10 people you can get away with that. At that scale you can invest in all of those activities with each member of your team; playing different roles at different times. As the team scales however, and as one team becomes multiple teams, you need to find those individuals that will do this on your behalf. Who are those individuals that people automatically look towards and who are those people who verbalise your vision and values when you’re not in the room? These folks you need to grow. I’ve also learnt that not everyone is going to be suitable for all of these positions. Your mentor is not necessarily your coach and your loudest champions might not have the experience or influence (yet!) to be your obvious mentors (although I’ll talk about reverse mentoring more later). ...

I’ve had the opportunity over the past 5 years to be involved in many many different cloud migrations of all shapes, sizes and industries. From large-scale lift and shifts, native refactoring and even one or two cloud-to-cloud migrations. There are couple of things I have learnt along the way that appear to remain true irrespective or size, scope or type of organisation. 1. The cloud provider you choose isn’t the best technical fit but the best cultural fit There used to be a trend when organistations were moving to the cloud to ask the question: which cloud provider do we go with? I still occasionally see this in RFPs for big multi-nationals. This lead to a lot of long conversations, commercial modelling, TCO comparisons and contract negotiations. After all of this work (for which we were handsomely paid) you were still left with a fairly long list of trade-offs that you were buying into and the decision was made based on an executive point-of-view associated with levels of comfort with the various risks on the table. Saying the decision was made based on trade-offs and risk is probably being a little kind. The truth in more often the whole exercise is one of confirmation bias to a decision that has already been made. ...

I suppose that many of you reading this are doing so because the theme of remote working is top of mind and like myself over the past year you’ve found yourself in a deep hole of blog posts and podcasts trying to give you all tips on how to work remotely, how to manage a team remotely and how to do so without burning yourself out and becoming a titrant. ...

This is one of those posts that I have been meaning to write for while. Over the years one of the things that I have found useful in my career has been always being up-to-date on the latest technology, the latest corporate news, and the latest ideas, methodologies and scientific research. At the speed that all of these areas move, it’s not the easiest thing to do and can often feel like your trying to drink from a firehose. ...