u/Turkishblokeinstraya

Not sure how coincidental this is, but working with 15+ organisations, I've seen the following behaviours in orgs where everything was a project and the people were called resources.

- Upfront plans

- Manual status reports (usually weekly PowerPoints)

- Assumption that efficiency scales linearly (spreadsheet formulas)

- Big hand-offs, late feedback

- Approval labyrinth and decision latency

- Focus on detection rather than prevention

Have you seen a similar pattern? What correlation do you see if any?

Strategy is a set of decisions an organisation makes to set itself apart. Those decisions determine the activities to carry out. AI adoption might be one of those activities, but it's not the decision itself (ideally).

For IKEA, it's flat-pack and self-assembly for low cost.

For Microsoft, it's enterprise customers and sticky ecosystem for market domination.

It's not AI, ML, LLM, or any particular tool or technology. 

AI is available to everyone, just like electricity. If low cost is your moat, you'd then look at minimising it further. The answer to minimise it might be more AI, less machinery, or something entirely different.

"More AI" isn't a strategy, it's FOMO. It can (and should) be an ingredient of business process redesign that ladders up to a strategic element.

The question should remain the same: How are you amplifying your strategic positioning?

What are your thoughts/experience on this? Is it just a shiny prefix to sprinkle everywhere? Or does it actually add value?

Mine would be "Retain context at all costs, there's no need for a middleman to translate between business outcomes and technical outputs."

What's yours?

Title is explanatory but I'll elaborate. If projects exist to deliver value to stakeholders, what make organisations add extra friction to welcome changing requirements? How do project benefit from pushing back on emerging needs?

I feel this is a dysfunction with a fancy name. It seems to be another way of saying "we can't break the silos, so we have cool names to release every now and then". There's no acceptable reason for releasing value every few months when it can be done every day or week.

If you love Scrum but don't know how to scale it, I suggest Nexus. I have implemented it at large organisations and worked great every time. Not many people know about it but it's actually the best way imo to scale up single-team Scrum with minimal overhead. It empowers teams without middlemen, and focuses on continuous integration through Daily NIT events.

Whenever I see jobs that mandate things like SAFe certs or release train experience, I run for the hills as I don't think it's easy to help those organisations that are stuck in their ways. Those job ads often want a coordinator as the silos can't collaborate, and they're not open to change their org design to improve flow.

What's your experience with release trains? How does your organisation release stuff? Keen to hear the good, bad, and the ugly.

I see many teams are actually cross-skilled silos. Business analysts, UI/UX designers, software developers, testers in one team with no feedback mechanisms.

What's your experience with cross-functional teams?

What have you tried to improve and what has worked for you?

For many organisations cross-functional teams have software engineers, UI/UX designers, and testers. That's it. No stakeholders in sight. No finance, no legal, no sales whatsoever.

If that reflects your setup, I'm keen to hear if you had these disciplines as separate teams before. How did combining them impact the value they deliver although stakeholders are still out of the picture?

Many organisations that are "digitally transformed" are now pursuing AI transformation. What I see is the same competing incentives that keep poisoning data, same silos, lack of governance and absence of accountability.

Hypewagon appears to have already departed though. I'm hearing local optimisation (this time by sprinkling AI dust) within some silos.

What's your observation?

This is often what happens despite the expensive transformation programs, pixel-perfect decks with messy operations. I keep seeing the same transformation blueprint; lay-off, restructure, uplift technology, voila!

When do you think organisations will stop spending millions of $$$ on cookie cutter transformation initiatives that don't transform the operating model and the culture behind it?

https://preview.redd.it/wyb87h5jtejh1.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=c47aa5a0f89eee858aba95894c81540dd3a077ce

Just a light-hearted Friday post.

But seriously, isn't it controversial? Is it called that way because good ideas suffer a slow death due to long lead times?

I'll start with an expired SSL certificate taking down one of the core systems at a ~1000 people business. Solution was extremely simple; just establish a process to get due dates visible in a shared place. 😄

Had similar stuff in 15k+ organisations too but they weren't in prod systems.

Let's say you started today, or you're pitching in to get the gig.

What questions have led you to major improvement areas faster than others, before being able to collect meaningful data? What made the senior leaders get hooked like they're in a delivery therapy session?

What makes your orgs live with the existing constraints that are visible from miles away? If you need Jane from Marketing and Bob from Finance to answer questions, just form a team.

What's holding these organisations back from having an org design that optimises flow? Is it simply just politics?

Read the full article here.

How many teams do you have, what's your average team size, and your lead times? I see a lot of large organisations implement (or try to) the thing but it seems they implement a bunch of buzzwords without substance. Lead times are still measured in months, PI planning that sugarcoats big batch discovery/delivery, and all other characteristics of waterfall.

Many SAFe practitioners that I've met in person didn't have anything measured, which is a bit surprising. I hope to get some clarity on how (if it does) it really benefits in measurable/proven ways.

Can someone tell me the benefits of hybrid delivery model? What's the benefit? Who benefits? What does it entail? etc.

Do you think current LLMs can achieve AGI?

If we achieved AGI, what would that mean for the economy, people, and the world in general?

Source: https://thenextweb.com/news/amazon-shuts-agi-lab-frontier-model-retreat-layoffs

RAG status. It's up to some PMO guy's gut telling them things are turning amber or red. I've never seen anything measurable behind it. It's often another layer to hide behind when optimism meets harsh realities of changing stakeholder needs with cemented deadlines.

Have you? What's the most useless metric you'd nominate?

A lot of organisations employ some abstract estimation techniques when it comes to agile delivery, often Story Points (simplified fibonacci) or T-shirt sizes (S/M/L etc.)

While I like the conversations relative sizing techniques spark within teams, accuracy is usually unreliable.

What are your thoughts? How do you forecast work?