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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

#91

Post by siva7 »

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…

> Everyone should have been thrilled by this development! Well we had a sprint review where some "Senior Project Manager" That wasn't really affiliated with our project but was some manager higher up was mad that us opening up new tickets mid sprint and closing them was ruining the org level burn down charts and expected delivery.

Why should they be thrilled that you were running on Kanban but claiming to do otherwise and therefore ruining the burn down charts?

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#92

Post by throwaway82931 »

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…

> they are usually right.

This message encapsulates why so many software jobs are terrible. Put your heart and soul into doing your best, earnestly combat NIH and pursue meaningful productivity, and _still_ the culture is such that at many companies, there will never be trust because the prevailing culture is that management is "usually right" that grunts can't be trusted.

I've worked for good bosses that aren't like this, but they're hard to find.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#94

Post by anders30 »

Last year, an Innovation Hero championed a completely new build system based on their homegrown version of asdf, essentially.

I was the one who had to stay late multiple Fridays making sure our Formal Builds would still work. I've been working to roll back the least well executed portions of this innovation for the past year because it doubled the amount of time required to release our software in the last stages of the pipeline (which was already five days, another rant, I work at VeryBigCo on a mixed HW/SW product).

I believe in this story the entrepreneur referenced worked to clear all similar hurdles, but it's hard to feel bad for folks who view themselves as Innovation Heroes when in many cases they're applying solutions in search of a problem. It's also very not fun to be "that person" aka "The Adult in the Room".

Yes, today the "Innovation" is part of our processes, but in stripped down form and it cost us two missed formal builds with the corresponding loss of credibility in our customer's eyes... in addition to my own sour grapes and missed dinners with my kid. It also cost me a personal friendship with the hero (my fault, but it's really hard for me to get past the fact this individual put their ego over my time with my family).

Agree it's a sign of a dysfunctional organization but it goes both ways. As an Innovation Hero, you should be aghast at how inefficient your org is, but as a part of that org, you should stop and ask, "How did we get this way and am I sure my solution truly solves all aspects of this situation?"

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#95

Post by ecshafer »

siva7 wrote: post #91
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…

> Everyone should have been thrilled by this development! Well we had a sprint review where some "Senior Project Manager" That wasn't really affiliated with our project but was some manager higher up was mad that us opening up new tickets mid sprint and closing them was ruining the org level burn down charts and expected delivery. Why should they be thrilled that you were running on Kanban but claiming to do otherwis…

This was a team of 10 people, so costing the company $2M+ a year. How is halving the timeline on a very major, mission critical project not a good thing?

Some appendage management structure in the organization having charts and reports looking a certain way is secondary to how much value is being produced by a team of expensive engineers.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#96

Post by constantcrying »

sodapopcan wrote: post #89
constantcrying wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

>The person you are responded to said it's a sign of dysfunctional org

He said it was his go to example of dysfunction.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#97

Post by riskable »

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…

I also work at a large financial institution and have had many similar situations. Fortunately, I'm the one in charge (team lead of sorts) and I have a pretty standard response to such "high level" nonsense:

"Your inability to adequately track my team's weekly or monthly performance is not my problem."

Every "project" has plans, deliverables, and due dates and those are the ultimate arbiters of a team's performance. Not the weekly/monthly statistics! If we open 10 or 10,000 tickets it makes no difference. It's entirely arbitrary and only carries meaning for the team in question (not upper management).

Like some high-level manager/PM is going to be able to make any difference whatsoever on some software development task by watching weekly Jira ticket statistics. Sounds like they're giving themselves busywork to justify their role. Because having fancy charts and statistics at meetings of managers makes you look like you know what you're doing (LOL).

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#98

Post by sailorganymede »

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.

Strange… The finance company I work at also does this. And it’s so strange. I feel like they value Jira tickets more than actual work being done. It’s even funnier cause we get asked to close work when we want to go into prod and told to create new tickets to put our work in to prod. which kind of is annoying.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#99

Post by snapetom »

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 :)

As an engineer recently turned technical product manager, I think this is one of the values I've provided. I focus on feature deliverables and meeting timelines. How you get there is sausage making that doesn't need to be over-emphasized.

There are too many ways to game the metrics. I've done it, and I'm constantly impressed at seeing how innovative colleagues do it. If you focus so much on metrics during the development process, you're going to just add useless overhead and piss off developers. My boss comes from a sales background, and thankfully he gets it despite pressure from other senior leaders.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#100

Post by t0bia_s »

- All large organizations – both government and corporate—need an innovation doctrine or else risk being outpaced by competitors.

They not risk anything, because competition to government is forbidden by law. They have monopoly and will to use force if their system is threatened by alternative one. Innovation is not priority as it is in free market.

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