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|In: App Dev Methodologies|Last Updated:

Good golly Miss Molly!

It was bad enough when folks thought the original version of DevOps … developers and IT operations actively collaborating … was an original idea.

Note to everyone in the IT universe: No matter what your context is, and who you’re working with, you didn’t invent collaboration. If you want credit for originality, COME UP WITH SOMETHING ORIGINAL!!!!

Whew. I feel much better now.

As for DevOps, at least it evolved into something reasonably original, or at least something reasonably radical. To save you a few minutes of googling, in its current form DevOps has contributed two important ideas. The first is that development teams should always leave software in a deployable state (the deployment part of “Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment”).

The second, which is foundational for all things Digital, is that automation should be the default no matter what process or practice you’re dealing with.

So far so good, and even better after Dave Kaiser and I layered in the idea of BusOps – that the collaboration between IT Operations and business Operations is just as important as the various collaborations IT developers should involve themselves in. (Want a more complete account? Oh, c’mon, you can afford the book).

But then someone had to invent DevSecOps. And CloudOps. MLOps (machine learning).

And now (drumroll) … we have FinOps, as in, someone should pay attention to a company’s cloud expenditures – “Cloud financial management,” in the words of the FinOps Foundation, which suggests that somewhere along the line, “Ops” and “Cloud” became synonyms.

Rather than just fixing the name (CloudFinOps … CFO for short?) let’s start right in on critiquing the FinOps Foundation’s six guiding principles:

Principle #1: Teams need to collaborate.

KJR perspective: Well, yes, that is the definition of “team.” Not original. Not even interestingly unoriginal.

Principle #2: Business value of cloud drives decisions.

KJR perspective: The business value of something should drive business decisions? No kiddin’ Dick Tracy. Not original. Not even interestingly unoriginal.

Principle #3: Everyone takes ownership of their cloud usage.

KJR perspective: Sure, if you want to slow everything down to a crawl. Certainly, those who consume cloud resources of any kind shouldn’t treat them as free. Yes, everyone should have enough awareness of what cloud stuff costs that they don’t make stupid decisions. But implementing technology-enabled business change is hard enough without worrying about nickel-and-dime stuff every step of the way.

Principle#4: FinOps reports should be accessible and timely.

KJR perspective: Oh, now we need FinOps reports? That means we need an organization to produce them. Which means … see Principle 3, because who’s going to own the costs of staffing and provisioning this new, emerging bureaucracy?

Principle #5: A centralized team drives FinOps.

KJR perspective: Of course it does. See the KJR perspective for Principle #4. Plus, this ignores a fundamental rule of organizational dynamics, which is that while centralization drives efficiency through economies of scale, decentralization is what drives innovation, by removing organizational barriers to rapid decision-making.

Principle #6: Take advantage of the variable cost model of cloud.

KJR perspective: We covered this ground a long time ago (“A cloud spiral of death,” 11/5/2012). If your demand for computing resources varies enough that being able to add … and shed … capacity as the situation calls for it matters, the public cloud’s variable cost model is downright nifty.

But costs that are variable are only useful when demand is variable. If your demand is steady and predictable, owning your own computing infrastructure might be more economical because you don’t have to tack on enough margin to turn a profit.

Bob’s last word: No question – organizations that operate without discipline usually end up collapsing under their own bloat. That doesn’t mean discipline should be imposed by layer upon layer of outside reviewers. All that does is create a high-friction enterprise.

An effectively disciplined organization, in contrast, comes from establishing a culture of discipline.

Culture is an organization’s lane markers. Governance and controls are, or at least should be, its guard rails.

If you hit them, something is already very wrong.

Bob’s sales pitch: Want practical guidance on how to engineer your organization’s culture? You need (here’s a surprise!) a book. Namely, you need Leading IT: (Still) the Toughest Job in the World. Chapter 8 will provide you with all the techniques you need to make this happen.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

How is Covid-19 like a strategic change initiative?

If you guessed it’s because both are potentially but unpredictably lethal, sorry, no. Unlike COVID-19, change initiative lethality is quite predictable.

The right answer: Fatigue sets in.

It’s dueling clichés: It isn’t the destination that matters, it’s the journey vs This isn’t a sprint — it’s a marathon.

Having only run marathons vicariously I can’t speak for those who do. But for those called on to run one involuntarily: Put me into this situation and I’d say screw the journey. In maybe three blocks fatigue would set in, and all I’d care about is the destination.

Eight months into the pandemic, those who aren’t suffering from mask-and-social-distancing fatigue either don’t wear masks and distance themselves socially, or belong to the Hermits, Recluses, and Anchorites Club.

The rest of us are involuntary marathoners, grudgingly trudging toward our at-last-a-vaccine-that-works destination.

On a more prosaic front, which is to say we’ve arrived at this week’s subject, I’ve been involved, directly or as a consultant, in several strategic, multi-year transformation programs. I’ve helped them progress from broad-but-vague intentions, through rigorous strategy-to-action planning, to the complexities of executing multiple, parallel, interconnected multi-project initiatives.

A constant: After a while the exhilaration that comes from early successes fades and change-fatigue sets in.

If you read Bare Bones Project Management (thank you!) you probably recall the project enthusiasm curve — the sequence of emotional states project teams typically experience over the life of a project: The downslope of Unenlightened Optimism, Dawning Pessimism, and the Pit of Maximum Despair; the recovery period of Enlightened Optimism; the speed bump of Pre-completion Doldrums.

Followed by, we hope, Success.

Project managers go through the same stages as their teams, only they aren’t afforded the luxury of going through them visibly. They help themselves through the tough parts so they can help their teams get through them too.

When the subject is large-scale strategic change, though, the fatigue is both broader and deeper than with project-level change. It’s broader because with strategic change typically comes reorganizations, restructurings, and staff reductions that change the how-to-succeed rules for just about everyone.

It’s deeper because strategic change fatigue can hit an organization’s executives even harder than it hits staff-level employees. When executives enter the Pit of Maximum Despair, here are some of the symptoms:

Tactical independence: “The strategy might pay off years from now. We should be looking for opportunities that will pay off tomorrow — low-hanging fruit, to coin a phrase — even if they won’t do much to move the strategy forward,” one might say.

Many tactically independent efforts really are good ideas the company really should pursue. The problem comes from failing to reserve a portion of the company’s capital and operating budgets to pursue them.

As a general rule, companies should split their budgets into thirds — one third to pay for the strategy, the second to pay for non-strategic opportunities, and the last to, if you’ll forgive the self-indulgence, keep the joint running.

Silo-oriented planning: Silo-oriented planning takes tactical independence to the next level. Where tactical independence might lead to change efforts anywhere in the company, silo-oriented planning results in investments in my part of the company. That’s what I’m accountable for. Gimme.

How to prevent, or at a minimum reduce silo thinking? We’ve covered this topic extensively in KJR. Here’s a partial list from the archives: https://issurvivor.com/?s=silo.

A too-brief summary: Managers exhibit silo thinking when structural factors like the budgeting process and bonus program encourage it.

Defection: Whether the stress of making change happen becomes too excessive, the requirement of collaborating with peers someone neither likes or trusts starts to have too much impact on the old sphygmomanometer, or the longer hours (okay, the hours aren’t longer but there are more of them) needed for executives to get both their day jobs and change responsibilities done means redefining “personal life” to mean “my job and nothing but my job” … whatever the face-value reasons, executives start to bail out and join the competition.

Or, worse, executives who championed the change put an exaggerated account of their roles in making it happen, and of how much progress has been made on their resumes, then bail out before the whole thing falls apart.

If you’re one of the executives responsible for leading your company through a major change, be alert for the signs of change fatigue, both among your peers and within yourself. Dealing with it so it doesn’t derail the program is your job.

If you’re anyone else in the business, be alert to the same symptoms. If you spot them make plans to survive the experience.

Your first responsibility is, after all, to yourself.

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