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Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

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Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#81

Post by justin_oaks »

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #12
chuckadams wrote: post #5

"Innovation Doctrine" sounds like something you put next to your Mission Statement. How about fostering an internal discussion board where employees can pitch ideas and get hooked up with others who know how to implement them? If you need guard rails around the anarchy, then you can tie action items to a ticket tracking system that's readable by the whole company. I can file a bug in JIRA against any product my compa…

Because in large companies, any helpful suggestions get lost in the noise. Everyone has opinions on how things could be done better, but very few of them are good.

I remember a company I worked at that an internal website for suggesting ideas. The problem is that the management never looked at it. And because of that, employees stopped posting to it. And that was that.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#83

Post by laidoffamazon »

p_j_w wrote: post #62
laidoffamazon wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The promotion thing seems severely overstated. At the higher levels for IC and management this is basically how all tech companies that build products are run. But you don't see this said about Microsoft or Amazon, even though they also have hundreds of new features and discrete new products per year. My theory for why Google is different remains unpopular, however.

>My theory for why Google is different remains unpopular, however. May we hear it?

I think it's because Google has created an insular, navel-gazing culture that is excessively engineer driven rather than customer driven, to the extent of thinking people not at Google are just inferior.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#84

Post by constantcrying »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #80
constantcrying wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No of course not, we doubled our number of tickets and filled in "placeholder" on half of them, and used them as needed then closed everything out at the end of the sprint, where we were congratulated by everyone for our phenomonal estimation. Are you sure this is a negative example? You even have a work around which makes everyone happy. This isn't what a dysfunctional organization looks like.

It’s called gaming the metrics and it’s totally a sign of dysfunction at the org level. The team that decided to do this to keep the metrics happy rocks, though :)

>It’s called gaming the metrics and it’s totally a sign of dysfunction at the org level.

Have you seen actually dysfunctional organization?

Millions being burned over ridiculous mismanagement. Bureaucracy which takes up vast amounts of time. Tracking of completely meaningless metrics. An IT department which needs to be "worked around". Managers who's only interaction point is them asking you what they should write into their MS Project document. Constant shifting away of responsibilities. People making completely unqualified decisions over the heads of the actual people being concerned. Inter department conflicts.

Really I could go on, but a bit of massaging metrics (which are totally irrelevant anyway and their trackers can be safely fired) is not particularly bad.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#85

Post by danaris »

constantcrying wrote: post #76
ecshafer wrote: post #61

My goto example of a dysfunctional and bureaucratic organization is an example I saw in a finance company I worked for. I was a on team that we were doing a major project. We basically ran Kanban but had to run "sprints" so we chose 4 week sprints to get it out of the way and we put everything on the board we had to get done that month to stay on track. Our pipeline was setup in such a way that you were required to h…

>No of course not, we doubled our number of tickets and filled in "placeholder" on half of them, and used them as needed then closed everything out at the end of the sprint, where we were congratulated by everyone for our phenomonal estimation. Are you sure this is a negative example? You even have a work around which makes everyone happy. This isn't what a dysfunctional organization looks like.

It's still dysfunction even if the group in this case was able to finagle a happy ending to this specific story.

Charts and processes are there to serve people, not the other way around. If a particular group is clearly doing a great job, but the way your metrics are set up claims they're causing problems, then the problem is in your metrics.

The organization is dysfunctional because a higher-level manager is able to enforce their particular view of how these metrics are supposed to work at the expense of actually productive groups underneath them.

Note that if the GP had actually done what they were told, they would simply have not worked on all those bugs that came in mid-sprint until the next one.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#86

Post by constantcrying »

danaris wrote: post #85
constantcrying wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No of course not, we doubled our number of tickets and filled in "placeholder" on half of them, and used them as needed then closed everything out at the end of the sprint, where we were congratulated by everyone for our phenomonal estimation. Are you sure this is a negative example? You even have a work around which makes everyone happy. This isn't what a dysfunctional organization looks like.

It's still dysfunction even if the group in this case was able to finagle a happy ending to this specific story. Charts and processes are there to serve people, not the other way around. If a particular group is clearly doing a great job, but the way your metrics are set up claims they're causing problems, then the problem is in your metrics . The organization is dysfunctional because a higher-level manager is able t…

My point was just that the example is a very low bar for dysfunction.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#87

Post by sodapopcan »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #80
constantcrying wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No of course not, we doubled our number of tickets and filled in "placeholder" on half of them, and used them as needed then closed everything out at the end of the sprint, where we were congratulated by everyone for our phenomonal estimation. Are you sure this is a negative example? You even have a work around which makes everyone happy. This isn't what a dysfunctional organization looks like.

It’s called gaming the metrics and it’s totally a sign of dysfunction at the org level. The team that decided to do this to keep the metrics happy rocks, though :)

Exactly. Org-level metrics are a sign distrust and micromanaging. It's useful for a team to look at their own metrics so they can understand what they are capable of delivering, but no one else should care. That they can reliably and consistently deliver a satisfactory amount of work should be the only "metric" they are judged on.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#88

Post by danaris »

foobarian wrote: post #71
cogman10 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This all, imo, is simply a trust problem primarily from leadership. Leadership does not trust the grunts to do productive work. So in order to make sure productive work is done, they build elaborate systems of cases, reviews, meetings, planning, scheduling, fighting, readjusting when the schedules are invariably missed, and finger pointing. All almost always completely devoid of input from the grunts. The middle mana…

> Leadership does not trust the grunts to do productive work Not only that, but unfortunately they are usually right. Without oversight the in-house team has high likelihood of building NIH spaghetti, which causes more problems down the line. To avoid the negative outcome leadership needs to be technically competent and resourced, and that's the other side of the coin - usually they don't have the expertise so in a w…

> Without oversight the in-house team has high likelihood of building NIH spaghetti

I think when you see this you need to start digging deeper and questioning why this is happening.

Is it because the "grunts" are genuinely bad at their jobs? If this is the case, then who hired them?

Or is it because they have been conditioned to believe that if they ask for permission to use an outside tool/library/etc, they will be told "no, we don't have the budget for that" or "that has to go through 12 layers of approval" or "great idea! we'll get it into a committee to talk about the best way to implement it and get back to you (in 6-12 months)"?

In other words: Are they building NIH spaghetti not because they lack oversight, but because they have too much, that hampers them from actually doing their damn jobs?

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#89

Post by sodapopcan »

constantcrying wrote: post #84
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s called gaming the metrics and it’s totally a sign of dysfunction at the org level. The team that decided to do this to keep the metrics happy rocks, though :)

>It’s called gaming the metrics and it’s totally a sign of dysfunction at the org level. Have you seen actually dysfunctional organization? Millions being burned over ridiculous mismanagement. Bureaucracy which takes up vast amounts of time. Tracking of completely meaningless metrics. An IT department which needs to be "worked around". Managers who's only interaction point is them asking you what they should write in…

The person you are responded to said it's a sign of dysfunctional org, not that it by itself make an org dysfunctional. There is a huge difference.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#90

Post by cruffle_duffle »

apozem wrote: post #79
ecshafer wrote: post #61

My goto example of a dysfunctional and bureaucratic organization is an example I saw in a finance company I worked for. I was a on team that we were doing a major project. We basically ran Kanban but had to run "sprints" so we chose 4 week sprints to get it out of the way and we put everything on the board we had to get done that month to stay on track. Our pipeline was setup in such a way that you were required to h…

That is amazing. I worked with a (different?) finance company that did the same thing - every team was judged on their burndown charts. From what I saw, it did no good. Teams simply did not use tickets to track work. If a story surfed sprints, its “ticket” was closed at the end of one sprint and a new one was opened for next. If a priority bug came in mid-sprint, we simply worked on it without a ticket.

> If a story surfed sprints, its “ticket” was closed at the end of one sprint and a new one was opened for next.

LOL, just joined a team that seems to be doing exactly what you describe. You start attaching performance incentives to how tickets are estimated and closed... people are gonna game the fuck out of them.

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