In my company, awards and prizes always go to people that go "above and beyond" the processes the company sets in the first place.
Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization
101–110 of 170 posts
Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are various articles on developing a culture of innovation, e.g. https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-hard-truth-about-innovative-cult... . Probably some books too. Even ChatGPT probably has decent advice. Management is not technically complex, it just requires putting in the work. But of course it is not easy, e.g. the first advice in the HBR article is to fire incompetent people, whereas the example here was governmen…
> chatGPT probably has decent advice If chatGPT has anything other than banal platitudes, I'll eat my hat.
It seems... practical? But not really rocking the boat. Just using Jira though seems like a big step for a government organization. I wouldn't eat my hat but I'd maybe nibble on it and play with the prompts more.https://chatgpt.com/share/13585d1b-a781-49fc-aa42-a7322b6f32...
Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization
#103My 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.…
> "Your inability to adequately track my team's weekly or monthly performance is not my problem."
I'm an engineer and I can certainly understand and empathize with where that sentiment comes from.
However, when people say things like this the first thought that goes through my head is "there is a culture problem."
That sentiment underscores an adversarial relationship between teams and leadership/management. That adversarial relationship should never exist (it does all too often, but it shouldn't).
Tracking timelines and deliverables is something that requires communication. That communication can be automated, but it's not up to leadership or management to implement that automation. They are not the engineers.
So if the process that is in place, which has worked for them despite inefficiencies (which they may not be aware of) is suddenly disrupted then no, it is not only "their problem." Some team went and did something differently than how things are usually done. The team [rightfully] recognizes that it is an improvement, but it was unsolicited and the communication / warning of the upcoming change was likely lacking.
Companies are called "companies" for a reason. They involve multiple people with varying skill-sets, responsibilities, understanding of how things do and should work, they have their own pressures and reporting structures (they need to hand things over to their management who expects a certain status quo as well) and most people have a default low tolerance for change.
This is no one person's fault. The company culture needs to facilitate iteration, improvement and innovation.
Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization
#104My 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…
Am I working for The Tacoma Chart Co. or are we developing actual products here?
Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
> "Your inability to adequately track my team's weekly or monthly performance is not my problem." I'm an engineer and I can certainly understand and empathize with where that sentiment comes from. However, when people say things like this the first thought that goes through my head is "there is a culture problem." That sentiment underscores an adversarial relationship between teams and leadership/management. That adv…
the management where I work, has the known strategic objective of eventually outsourcing all our development jobs to our indian facility. However, they prefer us to not leave our jobs before time, to ensure an orderly transition that wont lose us customers.
In which universe are we not supposed to have an adversarial relationship?
Our role in this is that our former ownerboss sold us to one of the big vertical software graveyards when he retired.
Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization
#106The idea of calcified culture and process isn't limited to large bureaucracies and government institutions. It's just as prevalent in orgs barely tipping over three figures' worth of people. In many ways, seeing it from both the large and the small, the smaller ones are often the most difficult to change because there are one or two people touching everything. Most often they have been there for a long time and such having the 'trust' of management so the bare minimum of 'new' ideas, and new being the state-of-the-art of the industry ten years ago, because they might have to adapt.
Playing the innovation hero in that kind of org is dangerous, and I have the battle scars, the burn-out and resentment to prove it. Others have pointed out that the point of the power structures is to self-perpetuate and any threat to that is swiftly dealt with.
It's just so sad to see, all because people fear change. I don't know how to change that other than replacing those lifers and swapping out management.
Now I know what to look for and am willing to bounce at the first sign of it.
Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ah GP did ya, fair enough. I assume a bit of hyperbole but sure. I would infer that there is a lot more going on than just some guy worried about if some guy is worried about individual teams' metrics getting messed up but I don't know the whole story.
Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization
#108My 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…
> 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.
This is giving me flashbacks of a company I worked for (for a very short period of time).
For some reason, they decided that planning accuracy was the most important metric for the software organization. This was the headline metric they talked about in executive meetings and it was primarily how the program managers' bonus structure was determined.
So everything in the company revolved around planning accuracy. Opening new tickets within a sprint was strongly discouraged. Doing work from the next sprint was heavily discouraged. Trying to take on big projects within a sprint was heavily discouraged, because if you couldn't 100% guarantee that it would be done by the end of the sprint it posed an existential threat to the Program Managers' charts, and therefore their bonuses.
Program Managers wouldn't come out and say any of this, of course. They knew the situation was at odds with delivering software quickly. However, if you deviated from the plan they would pull you into meeting after meeting for hours and hours to try to keep you in line.
If you opened a new ticket mid-sprint, you'd get pulled into meetings with Program Managers to justify it. They'd argue and debate and cajole you into deleting the ticket and rolling it into something halfway related. They'd CC your manager on 5 different e-mails and check in multiple times a day to make sure you'd fallen in line. It was hell.
Weirdest part to me was how many people around me seemed to enjoy that structure. They recognized the game and gladly played along, delivering a couple hours of work each day and then sitting in meetings to talk about it for the rest of the time.
It all came crashing down about 18 months in, when management brought in someone who actually understood software development and started actually looking into what people were doing. I was gone by then, but they went slash and burn on the remaining department. They cut it down to 1/5th of the size and started delivering, as far as I can tell, the same amount of work.
Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization
#109I worked for a large company and started seeing opportunities for automation immediately. I proposed some solutions to my boss, and he told me that he agreed that these tasks could be automated, but that we have 10,000 other tasks that could be automated, and each one takes a few months to get the resources provisioned and also set aside developer (me) time to get it done, which could be spent on other projects. What…
I know that feeling all too well. And it's such a hard truth that devoting just a little time, letting some projects slip just a bit, to fixing those systemic problems could make lots of others go away, it's just next to impossible to get people to want to change. I've found because people don't want to, they want to keep doing what they're doing and are scared of anything new because that may mean either they'd have to retrain, or more pathologically, that their position is threatened.
It all comes down to the people. The right people can make all the difference in something like that, the wrong people make it miserable for the rest.
Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Clean up enough messes left behind by grunts that were trusted by management and you will be cynical too :-)