As a bystander you can observe a retrospective and hope to see some of these symptoms listed by Adrian Howard of a good one. But keep in mind that you should be happy to hit some of these and getting all of them right probably means you have reached the summum of team work.
Category: Agile
One of the points in this list by Paul Osman that I recently stumbled on is that things like “staging” are indeed mostly useless however much people want to keep using them.
A fairly definitive article about why SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) should not be used. Mostly because it is the antithesis of every kind of agility.
A broad treatment of what the essential quality of Fingerspitzengefühl means.
A long treatment of how to scale work as organizations grow with some helpful guidelines: “Keep the work parallel, the groups small, and the resources local.”
This profile on C.C. Myers is a good example of leading from the front but even more than that it shows that speed begets speed.
https://www.comstocksmag.com/longreads/cover-worlds-fastest-man
A quick rundown by Github of how to develop quickly on production using feature flags and what benefits that brings.
https://dev.to/mscccc/how-we-use-ship-small-to-rapidly-build-new-features-at-github-5cl9
A government that’s certain to win
I’m not that negative about the Dominic Cummings job ad, because:
- Unlike a lot of people in governments everywhere, he seems to have a clue what he is doing.
- That a person who’s winning would quote Boyd is not a coincidence.
- Using a blog in this way (or Trump tweeting like he does) is the direct e-government that everybody has always been asking for. Not so fun now that we have it, is it?
- Governments and institutions are breaking or already are broken in this age. They do need large scale overhaul.
This is even worse in Germany where the institutions are bigger and the ahistorical denial of reality is immense. It’s going to be really ugly when they go down. - A city like Berlin, that can’t get anything done to save its life, would probably be massively improved by this approach. Our local government here can’t find its own asshole without help from McKinsey. Please somebody do this for Berlin.
Such a well-written and cogent argument by Dave Mangot about how it definitely does matter whether you choose to deploy on Fridays or not and also that that choice is fully your own.
Always nice to read a positive career history from somebody, like this one by Alicia Hickey, but especially nice if you’re in it named as the team lead who made a crucial suggestion.
https://medium.com/@lonelypeanut/finding-out-what-sticks-1f124bda0c19