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March 10 - April 11, 2018
Table 9-4. How organizations process information Pathological Bureaucratic Generative Power-oriented Rule-oriented Performance-oriented Low cooperation Modest cooperation High cooperation Messengers shot Messengers neglected Messengers trained Responsibilities shirked Narrow responsibilities Risks are shared Bridging discouraged Bridging tolerated Bridging encouraged Failure→scapegoating Failure→justice Failure→inquiry Novelty crushed Novelty→problems Novelty implemented
The DevOps Enterprise Forum has proposed a set of statements based on Westrum’s data that attempts to measure the health of information flow on a team. Respondents answer using a Likert scale where “strongly disagree” = 1 and “strongly agree” = 7: On my team, information is actively sought. On my team, failures are learning opportunities, and messengers of them are not punished. On my team, responsibilities are shared. On my team, cross-functional collaboration is encouraged and rewarded. On my team, failure causes enquiry. On my team, new ideas are welcomed.
Effective communication doesn’t just happen. You can’t just check it off your to-do list and assume it’s working.
According to a report from Towers Watson, “organizations that are highly effective in both their communication and change management practices are more than twice as likely to significantly outperform their peers as organizations that are not highly effective in either of these areas.”
All that back-and-forth causes delays, as each meeting or email increases time-to-production. In the end, it can easily take months to launch a new feature. The solution to this problem is to put the whole value stream into a single delivery team (see Chapter 7
All meetings must have an owner, who provides a stated purpose or an agenda. If a meeting doesn’t have one of these and you cannot immediately come up with one, cancel the meeting.
Distribute all relevant documents before the meeting so participants can prepare and meeting time doesn’t have to be used to bring everybody up to speed. Or, make it clear that the beginning of the meeting is allocated for document review, so attendees know how they need to prepare.
Here’s a quote from Steve Jobs, explaining why he wouldn’t let people hide behind PowerPoint: “I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking. [...] People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”
In “Email Transparency”, Greg Brockman describes how and why Stripe made all emails available to everybody.
Drake Baer’s “3 Ways Steve Jobs Made Meetings Insanely Productive — And Often Terrifying” shows the three most important meeting techniques from Steve Jobs.
Mic Wright’s “Forget ‘Inbox Zero’: Your Empty Email Account Means Nothing” is a great article about the actual intention of inbox zero, and suggests that you avoid “living in your inbox,” where your inbox is not only email, but also other communication channels.
you want people to know everything they need to know, but still be able to focus on the jobs they were hired to do.
The mission, vision, and strategy of the company are examples of core, long-term information that everyone in the company needs to know.
But as long as you don’t belabor the topic, repeating important information reassures those that already know it that nothing has changed. And again, it helps ensure that new hires are on the same page as everyone else.
Tell everybody that slides are the exception, and that either working software or graphs should be presented instead since these focus more on achievements than on plans.
Sensitive topics like individual performance issues were scheduled for the end of the meeting, so the cameo attendee could leave early without missing any other topics.
A town hall is similar to an all-hands meeting — you invite the whole company — but the agenda is set by employees rather than management. This is typically done by having people ask questions and offer input in advance of the meeting. A senior leader or an internal communications person then compiles the questions and feedback, inviting the appropriate people to answer the questions that have been asked.
As Fred Brooks states in The Mythical Man-Month: “The communication structure in an organization is a network, not a tree, so all kinds of special organization mechanisms (‘dotted lines’) have to be devised to overcome the communication deficiencies of the tree-structured organization.”
The first and maybe most important advice to follow is, “one team, one office,” meaning you should strive to keep individual teams within the same physical office. As soon as you split teams between offices, communication overhead increases dramatically.
“Don’t make a change just because it worked well for Google or Facebook. Do what’s right for your company.”
Step 3: Test It with a Small Group This step is often overlooked, but it’s very important that you test the change with a small group before rolling it out more broadly. If you’re planning a change to the structure of feature teams, for example, choose a single team to test the new setup.
Table 12-1 breaks down the essential practices critical to team growth, and references where to find more information in this book.
The employees doing screening calls complain that it takes too much of their time. A well-calibrated recruiter, who does most of the screening work, can help here (see “The First Recruiter”
You don’t have enough quality CVs in the top of the funnel. Hire a recruiter to do sourcing, and try to boost your outreach in general. Start building your employer brand (see “Building an Employer Brand”
Engineering complains the designs they are getting from designers are creating too much work and the actual functionality could be achieved in a simpler way. Design is not really integrated in delivery teams. This can happen when designers are formally part of a delivery team, but are not sitting with the team or are assigned other work to do.
