Sriram Narayan's Blog

In a world of rapid change, it is quite gratifying to note the continuing relevance of Agile IT Org Design published in 2015. As a buildup to its fifth anniversary in June 2020, I'll post snippets from the book couple of times a week on LinkedIn.
This content is obtained from a feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/agileorgd... Get the book: www.agileorgdesign.com © Sriram Narayan

In a world of rapid change, it is quite gratifying to note the continuing relevance of Agile IT Org Design published in 2015. As a buildup to its fifth anniversary in June 2020, I'll post snippets from the book once or twice a week.

Snippets so far

From the Preface: Enterprise IT has mostly underperformed. It’s been a struggle to deliver IT-as-enabler, to say nothing of IT-as-differentiator. Partly as a result, it is common to hear of strained relationships between business and IT. This doesn’t...

Product development teams have to deal with multiple stakeholders. They each have their own set of priorities. That's natural. Reconciling these priorities into a single-threaded product backlog can be a thankless task. In theory, "cost of delay" based prioritization techniques should let us avoid "HiPPO prioritization". In practice, these techniques help only so much. How do you validate and normalize costs assigned by different stakeholders? The whole process is vulnerable to false rigor...

This content is obtained from a feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/agileorgd... Get the book: www.agileorgdesign.com © Sriram Narayan

I have been advocating for and helping clients with the use of written decision records in contentious areas of decision making. However, it is a big change for people who prefer to discuss things verbally over a meeting (face to face or over a call). They claim that it is easy to misunderstand intent over a written medium and that doing it in writing would slow things down.

The book weighed in on this topic in the chapter on communications. An excerpt:

"However, the discussions leading to thes...

Taking DevOps to the Org Chart from Sriram Narayan In order to realize the full potential of DevOps, it is insufficient to only aim for better engineering techniques and greater automation, hard as that may be in itself. One of the implications of DevOps is a merger of development and corresponding operations teams into several build-it-and-run-it teams. This calls for a re-org at the typical tech organization that supports an old-guard business. The re-org is a challenge for large tech...

Came across this excellent, in-depth article on the failure of Target Canada. One of the issues was that products were routinely out-of-stock in the stores (leading to upset customers) while registering as in-stock in the company's SAP system:

At one point, Target Canada had printed a weekly flyer in which nearly every single item featured on the front cover was out of stock.

Eventually, they find one of the causes of the problem:

A small group of employees also made an alarming discovery that h...

We can't trade-off reliability for speed in the medium term. Models that make this assumption are inherently flawed. If you really want to think in terms of a two-pronged approach, think strategic and utility as I describe in my post on business-capability centric orgs. Martin Fowler seconds it.This content is obtained from a feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/agileorgd... Get the book: www.agileorgdesign.com Sriram Narayan

One of the key functions of Project Portfolio Management (PPM) in IT is that of allocating finite funds to a subset of projects that vie for funding. When it works well, PPM becomes an effective agent of capital allocation within enterprise IT by funding promising projects and terminating underperforming ones. In principle, this is not very different to how a venture capitalist might manage their portfolio by investing in promising ventures and freezing funding or writing off investments in v...

Although we need to arrive at an operating model that allows for autonomy, mastery, and purpose, we need to balance it with mechanisms for accountability and alignment. This has to be done for each dimension of the operating model.
In the area of decision making, we allow for autonomy by letting outcome owners have decision rights while others who support the outcome have input rights. That said, we have to ensure that people with decision rights do not disregard the opinions of those with inp...