Amy Management

Reflections from 2019

2019, it’s the end of the year, and the end of the decade. This time 10 years ago I had just been made redundant, it ended up being perfect timing and the decade that followed was amazing and challenging. I’ve been lucky enough to work with teams full of smart and friendly folk and through the fantastic LondonCD Meetup and Pipeline Conferences discovered Continuous Delivery which ended up leading me into Engineering Management. 

Along the way I’ve spoken at conferences and meetups, contributed to a book, co-led Weekend Testing Europe, appeared on some podcasts, and launched Humans + Tech. Whoo. 

Not everything has gone exactly to plan and I leave this decade with greater patience and tolerance. Yes, really. I know that every situation teaches you something and for me at least, I need to look for that opportunity and focus on it. Moving into Engineering Management has given me great opportunities to learn about things that I had never even thought about. From coaching people to Kubernetes, and with an awful lot of AWS too, I’m loving the random things I get to learn day to day through work. 

I love to read and this decade has been accompanied by some of my favourite books. I’ve loved Radical Candor, The Unicorn Project, Deep Work, Resilient Management, Powerful, and The Coaching Habit as well as many, many others. I could read all day, every day but in the past few years I’ve started to realise that filling my mind with endless ideas doesn’t necessarily translate into successful execution. Reading a little less and working to apply the best ideas either to myself, my writing, or my teams is a better approach and one that I’ll be continuing to work on in 2020. 

In the next decade I’m going to be more intentional. I’m not very good at being bored and often end up agreeing to things without really thinking about what I want to do. In 2020, and hopefully in the years that follow, I’ll be choosing just a few things to really focus my attention on. The results may feel slower, and I might actually need to learn to accept boredom, but the end result should be far more satisfying. In 2020, my (out of work) focus will be on Humans + Tech, my book, and working out how to pull the millions of threads of ideas into a coherent story or tool that actually makes sense. 

Huge thanks to everyone I’ve had the pleasure of working with, getting to know, drinking coffee with, or sharing ideas with over the internet. Happy New Year!

Amy Book Reviews

Book Review – The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim

It’s been nearly seven years since The Phoenix Project made The Three Ways a regular topic of Tech conversation. These days most tech companies are at least aware of, and hopefully embracing Systems Thinking, fast feedback loops, and learning cultures to deliver value to the customers. 

In his new book The Unicorn Project, Gene Kim revisits the fictional company “Parts Unlimited” to explain the five ideals of Locality and Simplicity; Focus, Flow and Joy; Improvement of Daily Work; Psychological Safety; and Customer Focus. For anyone looking for, or undergoing a digital transformation these five ideals will be very familiar. Just like with The Phoenix Project, The Unicorn Project excels not from introducing radical ideas but in helping to highlight a path through the chaos. 

The Unicorn Project is set at the same time as The Phoenix Project and follows Maxine and a “Rebellion” team as they battle to break team dependencies, and operational silos to allow teams to deliver customer value, fast. For many people working in tech the description of discovering valuable customer features hidden in Jira backlogs and having to raise tickets with multiple different teams to access code, environments, and even to release will be painfully familiar. I loved seeing enjoyment and job satisfaction getting so much focus, Kim did a great job of capturing the levels of frustration that poor build and deployment setups can bring.  

Following a fictional team in a fictional company gives great creative licence and allows many of the most painfully secret Tech practices to be included and resolved. Not everyone will love the fable style of storytelling but I think it’s a powerful way to share the darker side of many tech teams; we see the power struggles that can play out, and the resistance to change surfaced. In one section the “Rebellion” team accidentally cause a Production Incident as they work to build an independent release pipeline. These are the realities of many tech teams but are rarely covered in real experience reports.

On the flip side the fictional storytelling does lead to some fairly incredible situations. Firstly the timeframes, whilst I know that developers only needing days, or sometimes hours to solve the trickiest of problems is useful to keep the story moving, it is incredibly unlikely that any company would manage to solve so many issues with this level of ease. Secondly Parts Unlimited seems to have somehow hired, and retained, a huge number of talented people, all of whom have been sitting waiting for this opportunity to come along. Again I know this helps keep things moving along nicely but anyone going through even a fraction of these issues needs to prepare themselves for at least a few months of code and platform wrangling. 

Despite this the story is engaging and does a great job of following the team as they fix things, step by step. In the real world dependencies, data needs, security, and more can end up becoming so entangled that it’s difficult to see a way out. In The Unicorn Project we get to see the whole messy, uncertain path to fixing things. It shows that things do go wrong, people lose trust, and maybe you make the wrong decisions along the way. Despite this by working together, and having a really clear end goal you can make a huge impact on your job, and on the company.

In conclusion I’d say that The Unicorn Project does a fantastic job of covering many of the current tech challenges. Anyone working in tech should read this book and either celebrate that they don’t have to work in an environment like this, or be encouraged, and inspired, to see how much different an individual can have. Now go and find your own Rebellion.

Full disclosure: I received a pre-release copy of The Unicorn Project in exchange for a review. All views are my own. 

Amy Engineering Principles, Leadership, Management

2018 in Books

Books_of_2018_-_Google_DocsSometimes we read the book we need to solve the problem at hand. Other times we read a book and only afterwards see the situations that it has taught us to see.

2018 was a little lighter on reading than I would have liked but I did discover, and rediscover some gems.

First up was a reread of The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, Devops, and Helping Your Business Win. Five years on from its first publication and it’s starting to feel a little dated but still an excellent book with relevant lessons. Focusing on flow, and making work visible were key takeaways for me this time around.

Next up I read, and loved, Powerful by Patty McCord. Patty writes about recruiting, motivating, and creating great teams based on her experience developing the culture at Netflix.

“What takes the place of rules, processes, approvals, bureaucracy, and permissions?” The answer: Clear, continuous communication about the context of the work to be done. Telling people, “Here’s exactly where we are, and here’s what we’re trying to accomplish.”

And

“You want to be a lifelong learner; you want to always be acquiring new skills and having new experiences, and that doesn’t have to be at the same company. The fact is that sometimes you’re hired by a company to do something, and then you do it and it’s done. If I hire people to rebuild my garage, when they’re done I don’t need them to rebuild the back of my house.”

The most practical book I read in 2018 was Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and Devops: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim. This is a book crammed full of tips for helping teams achieve success, I particularly appreciated the focus on burnout that threaded its way throughout the book. Important reading.

Radical Candor by Kim Scott was my book of the year. “Radical candor is the sweet spot between managers who are obnoxiously aggressive on one side and ruinously empathetic on the other. It’s about providing guidance, which involves a mix of praise as well as criticism—delivered to produce better results and help employees achieve”. There are many, many great stories and transferable tips shared in this book. A joy to read, and a book that has changed the way I manage and want to be managed.

I ended up highlighting most of the book but this quote neatly sums up how it made me feel

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

My final book of the year was Switch by Chip Heath and  Dan Heath. Years ago I struggled through Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, enjoying the message but finding it hard to recall accurately. Switch does a great job of sharing the same message in a far more accessible format. I absolutely loved the Elephant and the Rider metaphor to describe our minds, and I found the stories in the book to be interesting and highly motivating. I can’t wait to put these ideas into practice in 2019.

How was your 2018? Did you discover any books worth shouting about?