Or how to rethink your next org-chart.
Refactoring code is straight forward. I don’t have hard feelings deleting code. Potentially even enjoy it. This is different with organizations. While organizations must evolve, change and adopt, the speed and flexibility is still limited with regards to people.
So it’s critical that organizations that shouldn’t exists don’t start to exist. And I continue seeing it happening. And then people are surprised of a re-org once someone notices the problem. They are everywhere:
The software engineers maintaining a legacy system that are tasked to also re-invent the future instead of radically under-staffing the legacy system and truly focus on the future.
The DevOps team not believing in the company’s principles by holding on to a central, gate-keeping mindset and related staffing while it could focus on engineering, trust and enabling autonomous teams.
The project management office with a heavyweight, central quarterly planning process involving 10.000s of hours and imposing non-suitable processes to teams instead of working along simple principles and objectives leading to autonomously operating teams.
The system admins that believe in the past and continue hosting servers and building racks for virtual machines instead of embracing the cloud.
The security teams that continue purchasing expensive firewall hardware and worry about USB sticks being put into computers instead of following the more secure and lightweight zero-trust concept.
Embrace change. Be radical. Trust in people. Think of the future.