Amazon (I’m told) anchors their culture with a metaphor. Every employee uses a cheap wooden door for a desk. It’s the key to getting a $107B company to act like a start up.
Baseball players anchor a culture of winning and mutual support by growing playoff beards.
Attitude is a kind of personal culture, and if you’re trying to make a change you need an anchor.
For me, efficiency is key. Believing I can succeed is terribly important.
It’s hard to feel that way sitting down.
Code Debt is the result of borrowing against future effort to speed short term delivery of code- the cost inevitably being paid back with interest when it must be fixed to be upgraded or changed.
Ben Horowitz points out that the concept applies elsewhere- like managerial debt, which is often paid back with politics and leadership crises.
I speak, on occasion, with IT Leadership that takes deep pride in hobbling systems together to minimize software and hardware costs. They often cut head count by training their users not to ask for help or expect too much.
Whether they know it or not, they are incurring several kinds of personal debt:
More commonly, IT struggles to communicate or persuade the business to invest in better technology. The business takes on some other kinds of debt.
Eventually, every debt is paid.
Can you say (after all of the hard work and late nights) that you have made measurable progress on improving service delivery quality, or is it a struggle to even define what that means?
Having perspective on this question is critical to setting and achieving goals that can be demonstrated to the business, and one way to achieve this perspective and its benefits is establishing a Service Management Office (SMO).
Continue reading “Service Management Office”
Every industry will face an inflection point at which technology will introduce dramatic change. Some companies will not be ready for their respective revolution, and their legacy business models and the quaint advantages upon which they traded will no longer be sufficient.
The banking industry is a great example. Banks are facing this challenge more immediately than most for a few reasons:
Stepping into Carbon Beverage Cafe on Platte, you’ll hear light music, steam from an espresso machine, and the chatter of keyboards from the patrons who spend their day at community tables or converging around the spare visible outlet.
These remote workers are here every day for a few minutes or hours. They work at some of the largest companies in Colorado and for some of the smallest startups.
Working remotely is growing in popularity. Surveys have shown that 37%[i] to 45%[ii] of employees work from home or remotely every month. Among college educated employees the number is higher at 55%.
Continue reading “Businesses move to support remote working”
