6 ms·

And throw in Conway's law [0] and the scope of the coordination becomes easier to understand. My career trajectory bought it come for me, intermittently contra

And throw in Conway's law [0] and the scope of the coordination becomes easier to understand. My career trajectory bought it come for me, intermittently contracting for/with a UK govt acquisition organisation buying systems for Govt customers. Task: make these disparate systems speak to each other * Q: Why don't the systems use the same protocols? * A: They are delivered by different contractors * Q: Why don't the contractors use the same (existing) standard? * A: They aren't incentivised to do contractually * Q: Why do they have different types of contract? * A: Because each one is contracted by a separate acquisition team * Q: Why don't the acquisition teams use common requirements / contracting / technical / etc approaches? * A: Because they are separately funded by different customers * Q: Why don't the customers speak to each other? * A: decades of institutionalised rivalries and differences of opinion regarding apparently common problems It took me about ten years to work down this list, understanding each layer. One of my most satisfying career moments was when I was asked to brief a senior customer decision maker who owned the resulting mess, and drew them a diagram showing the layers. He then set in motion a top-down alignment of the bit he could directly control: requirements writing. The belief was that getting consistent requirements would be a good starting point that would hopefully flow down the organisations involved. [Edit] Another problem with increasing coherence in this way is that it costs money (e.g. to adopt / set up the standards / protocols involved). Money that could be spent delivering customer requirements, and which PMs are reluctant to spend on 'under the bonnet' techie things the customers won't see let alone understand. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

MereInterest 3y ago
> The belief was that getting consistent requirements would be a good starting point that would hopefully flow down the organisations involved. Given the framing, I need to ask: what was the impact of the updated requirements, or has there not yet been sufficient time to tell?
- KineticLensman 3y ago
  I retired three years later so have lost touch. But before I left a couple of new procurements were starting up, and I attended at least one meeting where the separate customers were in fact in the same room and playing nicely with each other, which was a very good sign. The acquisition authority had also established some cross-cutting functions (design, contractual support) that would in theory support the new projects coherently, when they reached that point. As my career progressed, I got a better handle on the genuine cultural issues behind some of the customer-level differences. For example, one particular category of user had very different career progressions / longevity in different parts of the overall organisation (heroes in one part, zeros in the other, approximately). This affected the relative prioritisation of the relevant requirements by the respective customers, and the perceived value and affordability of solutions, in a way that overshadowed the tech-focussed arguments younger-techie-me would have made.
  - shalmanese 3y ago
    Thanks for providing a concrete example of a) what a relatively mundane value-add via co-ordination looks like. Something like this is impossible to communicate without so much context but these stories are happening in every single pocket of a giant org. b) What the artistry of it is. It's not easy and can take years to understand a single co-ordination problem well enough that you push single pebble and cause the right avalanche of change c) Why anyone who is looking for impact inevitably gets drawn into it, independent of their feelings of whether they personally enjoy it or not (spoiler alert: I have never met anyone who has told me this was their true passion from birth. All of us wade into it reluctantly and eventually develop the internal motivation to make it satisfying).

MereInterest 3y ago

> The belief was that getting consistent requirements would be a good starting point that would hopefully flow down the organisations involved. Given the framing, I need to ask: what was the impact of the updated requirements, or has there not yet been sufficient time to tell?

KineticLensman 3y ago
I retired three years later so have lost touch. But before I left a couple of new procurements were starting up, and I attended at least one meeting where the separate customers were in fact in the same room and playing nicely with each other, which was a very good sign. The acquisition authority had also established some cross-cutting functions (design, contractual support) that would in theory support the new projects coherently, when they reached that point. As my career progressed, I got a better handle on the genuine cultural issues behind some of the customer-level differences. For example, one particular category of user had very different career progressions / longevity in different parts of the overall organisation (heroes in one part, zeros in the other, approximately). This affected the relative prioritisation of the relevant requirements by the respective customers, and the perceived value and affordability of solutions, in a way that overshadowed the tech-focussed arguments younger-techie-me would have made.
- shalmanese 3y ago
  Thanks for providing a concrete example of a) what a relatively mundane value-add via co-ordination looks like. Something like this is impossible to communicate without so much context but these stories are happening in every single pocket of a giant org. b) What the artistry of it is. It's not easy and can take years to understand a single co-ordination problem well enough that you push single pebble and cause the right avalanche of change c) Why anyone who is looking for impact inevitably gets drawn into it, independent of their feelings of whether they personally enjoy it or not (spoiler alert: I have never met anyone who has told me this was their true passion from birth. All of us wade into it reluctantly and eventually develop the internal motivation to make it satisfying).