I have been so busy rebuilding my home office with a Human Solution UPLIFT Desk (more on that another day), I have been remiss in not noting how much I enjoyed a presentation by Mike Rognlien at a morning VitalSmarts conference last Thursday. Considering how much I am highlighting passages, his book, This Is Now Your Company, is going on my DevOps & Agile Book Club book list!
New Book: Standing on the Shoulders…
You know that when a book starts off with a forward by Gene Kim and then immediately quotes something written in 1159, it’s going to be great. Congrats to Carmen DeArdo on the release of Standing on Shoulders: A Leader’s Guide to Digital Transformation — I just broke it open!
The Eddie Van Halen of DevOps
As I said on Twitter, this is like having Eddie Van Halen complement your guitar work. ‘Night all.
This is the article Gene is referring to: “Shook Change Model”
P.S. I have gotten to speak to Gene Kim a couple times. He is one of the nicest guys I’ve met, and the epitome of my “Let’s Learn Together” tagline.
DevOps & Agile Book Club
After church and lunch at IHOP, I spent the rest of the afternoon creating a Microsoft Teams team (with channels) for a new DevOps & Agile Book Club at work. One of the things I love about both DevOps and Agile is the complete commitment to continual learning. Reading is one of the best ways to do that in my opinion.
I did a decent amount of on-line research to prep creating the club, but do you have pointers to good examples of book clubs (or personal experience with them)? Specifically DevOps and/or Agile ones? Any books we just must have on our list?
I can especially use ideas for a virtual book club (we cannot all meet together in person).
Thanks ahead of time for your wisdom!
Shook Change Model
As I work on research for a sermon about why God, when He can accomplish whatever He wants without us, has us help, I recalled of something that Gene Kim said in Beyond the Phoenix Project (a recording he did with John Willis):
John Shook wrote about his NUMMI experience in the Fremont plant, a joint venture between General Motors and Toyota. He wrote, “What my NUMMI experience taught me that was so powerful was that the way to change culture is not to change first how people think, but instead to start by changing how people behave — what they do. Those of us trying to change our organizations’ culture need to define the things we want them to do, the way we want to behave and want others to behave, to provide training and then to do what is necessary to reinforce those behaviors. The culture will change as a result.
This is what I meant by, ‘It’s easier to act your way to a new way of thinking than to think your way to a new way of acting.'” (Emphasis mine.)
Gene then continues, saying it lead to the Shook Change Model. MIT Sloan Management Review has Shook’s article about his NUMMI experience (it will require you to have at least a free account): [Read more…] about Shook Change Model
Counterintuitive IT™ (Part 1)
Intuition is a handy thing to have in IT. As a former IT Jack-of-all-trades, I could join an outage call and frequently identify what was wrong more quickly than the experts. As a newbie with DevOps, data science, and other emerging IT fields, I don’t have that advantage anymore. It is uncomfortable.
But, it is exciting.
That does not mean I am entirely bereft of intuition in these new areas. Logic is logic, regardless of subject. However, it is invigorating to discover new, Counterintuitive IT™ facts or assertions. This is the first in an ongoing series of posts where I will share Counterintuitive IT™ examples as I run into them.
Counterintuitive IT™ #1: CABs Don’t Help, They Hinder
Having spent too much time on outage calls, I can appreciate any effort to reduce change induced incidents (CIIs). Avoiding those is especially important in healthcare IT (my present career). At a minimum, we inconvenience our clinicians and/or patients. Worst case, it impacts patient safety.
One popular approach to minimize CIIs is to require all non-standard, non-emergency modifications of production systems go before a change approval board (CAB). Having multiple sets of eyes will ensure you have all your ducks in a row, significantly reducing the likelihood of a problem.
Change and Emotion
During a quick road trip this past weekend to Goodland, Kansas with my 11-year-old son, I finally opened Theory of Constraints by Eliyahu Goldratt. I didn’t read as much as I hoped (but you don’t go on a mini-vacation with your munchkin to ignore him). However, I loved Goldratt’s discussion of how change induces emotion (and what to do about it):
Let’s summarize once again this devastating process that connects improvements with emotional resistance.
Any improvement is change.
Leading to:
Any change is a perceived threat to security.
Leading to:
Any threat on security gives rise to emotional resistance.
Leading to:
Emotional resistance can only be overcome by a stronger emotion.
He then explains although that stronger emotion could be negative (“We are trying to overcome the immediate insecurity resulting from change, by provoking the long term insecurity of what will happen if we don’t change”), that’s not a good long-term plan. Instead, we want to develop an “emotion of the inventor” in people.
However, I will leave it there. You can get more by grabbing his book (well worth the price) and checking out chapter 2. 🙂
P.S. So, to date myself, every time I think about the title of this post, “Change and Emotion,” a Tesla song comes to mind:
A Conversation about Project to Product with Mik Kersten
Recently I was lucky enough to speak with Mik Kersten, author of a new “must read” book, Project to Product, and CEO of Tasktop.
Last year, when I completed reading his work, I put this review on Amazon with the title, “A Book that Demands a Decision”:
DevOps guru Gene Kim rightly introduced this book with, “Every decade there are a couple of books that genuinely change my worldview. … This is one such book.”
Mik Kersten provides ample evidence that the project and cost center orientation of so many software producing companies doesn’t fit the Age of Software, and suggests a way becoming product-centric via a focus on value flow. The book is a an appealing combination of real-world examples of those who got it right (and who didn’t) and practical explanations of what needs to be done to build measurable value networks.
Net effect for me? A mind that is racing on how best to distill it into something I can evangelize in my workplace. This isn’t a “single read” type of work, and extra kudos to Kersten for the useful glossary and extensive index.
Get the book. Your company’s future may depend on what it’ll bring to light.
I stand by those words. [Read more…] about A Conversation about Project to Product with Mik Kersten
Becoming a Python Pro
I just signed up for this brand new Python course…might be even the first student! 🙂
Courses from the SuperDataScience team are always a great purchase on Udemy. You can get this course for only $17 for 48 hours using this link.
I’m a beginner with Python, which I find painful to say because I used to be a Perl guru.
Either way, even if you aren’t personally interested in data science, Python is a tool to become adept at…and here’s a great course to help with that.
DS4B 201-R: Data Science for Business with R
Tonight I began Matt Dancho’s course, “DSB4B 201-R: Data Science for Business with R.” Even though I’ve only done the intro section, I am already glad I invested in the class. Clearly a well thought out, professional offering.
Now to hit Matt up on the course’s Slack channel to see if my coming up short on the baseline quiz means I need to go read-up to get a foundation first. 🙂
I’ll tag all my posts about the course with “DS4B 201-R” if you want to follow my experiences…