I’m continuing to read an Elegant Puzzle and chapter 5 discusses organizational culture. I think it provides some good actionable and concrete ways to think about culture, and most discussion I’ve seen about culture suggests that it is some mostly ineffable quality.
Inclusiveness Will also thinks culture is difficult to reason about, but suggests two major components for fostering an inclusive organization: opportunity and membership. An inclusive organization is one in which individuals have access to professional success and development.…
I was solving Advent of Code this morning and generally thinking about programming when an event from my weekend struck me as an excellent example of the benefits of lazy evaluation. Allow me to explain.
My wife is pregnant, and loves chewing on pellet ice. You know, the kind from Chic-Fil-A or Sonic. Well, it was Sunday and my wife was out of pellet ice, so it fell on me and the kid to go get some.…
From “Radical Candor” by Kim Scott, Chapter 4:
If Mark hadn’t decided on these OKRs, what would you all have planned to do next quarter?
While Mark’s vision was inspiring, [one team member] felt it was unrealistic. […] They would be working 85 hours per week. […] He had badly underestimated the lag time in a system that made work less efficient than it should be.
While Mark’s proposed goals made sense in theory, his team knew there were major obstacles that made his plan impracticable.…
I’m continuing to read an Elegant Puzzle and chapter 3 had some good considerations regarding defining teams and groups during a reorg that I think are good guidelines for building teams more generally:
Consider team sizes and management spread. Can you write a crisp mission statement for each team? Can you define clear interfaces for each team? Can you list the areas of ownership for each team? Is each responsibility owned by a team?…
I’m reading An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management, by Will Larson, at the recommendation of a good friend, and wanted to take some notes on it.
First, the book is gorgeous. I’ve got a hardcover copy via inter-library loan (thank you Meridian Library District, near Boise, ID, and thank you San Antonio Public Library), and the cover is bright white rough linen with black text and printing, and a black line drawing of a bush on the front cover reminiscent of an organizational structure, data structure, or actual organic bush.…
Reviewing some of my notes from the Leader Development Course I noticed something I’d written regarding communication plans. My take on “approachability” is something I need to explain to my folks early, actually.
Weapon school grads want to be, “humble, approachable, credible”, and this has always been what I’ve sought to be too. I don’t always succeed I’m certain.
Approachability can be quantified by how my team interacts with me. I need to let them know that to me approachability really is important.…
I just recently finished the book Turn the Ship Around, and I don’t have anything insightful to say but I did want to recall some points from it. I found the book to be fantastic and insightful - I agree completely with Captain Marquet’s leader-leader style, and hope in future positions I can remain as committed and mindful as he was to creating environments like the one in the book. I think the practices in the book are very similar to those adopted by agile software teams and mission command leadership styles.…
Doing a little more reading about what Digital Engineering & MBSE are supposed to encompass, I looked into DoD Architecture documentation. I’ve seen some “OV-1” documents before, and found them to be intuitive (when they weren’t too dense). I did not know where the nomenclature came from… Now I do.
https://dodcio.defense.gov/Library/DoD-Architecture-Framework/
The DoD office of the Chief Information Officer released the current version of the framework back in 2010. Now - while I think it is still completely applicable, and I acknowledge that perhaps it hasn’t needed any updates in that time… I think the age of this framework since last update probably says nothing good about how well it has been used and loved.…
I’m doing just a little learning about Digital Engineering, which seems to be almost synonymous with Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE). The concept of MBSE is that, in contrast to more traditional methods where the team-of-teams creates documents to coordinate all efforts (think long contract-style English text), the team creates a variety of models. Some of those models would be UML-like diagrams, others might be executable. Each model interface provides a view on the underlying data & model - a view useful to some of the development teams for understanding what must get build.…