Change management
Change management
Attention to details
Throughout my career, I have observed that different people are often attentive to and focused on different levels of conceptual refinement. These perspectives vary according to their roles on a project, their individual personalities, and their experience. I have tended to mentally categorize these individuals into one of two different types of individuals at the top and bottom of this granularity perception universe: a "Roughly right" personality type, and a "Precisely right" type. Read more »
Wise decision-making
Decision-making requires us to understand a situation and accurately weigh the alternatives which present themselves to us. To gain such an understanding, we need to do far more than just collect facts and information. Our understanding is subject to all kinds of flaws and biases in our perceptions of reality. As John Sterman describes it:
Decision-making processes are also unfortunately prone to political influences and increasing bureaucracy. These factors can combine to delay conclusions and dilute our focus on achieving desirable outcomes. Fred Brooks describes these distractions as follows:
In How Decision-making can be improved, authors Milkman, Chugh, and Bazerman summarize the primary challenges of decision-makers: Read more »
Discovering and realizing value
The pursuit of value is usually a tenuous and uncertain journey. Like quality, the characteristics we seek in this pursuit are, like beauty, often unique to the eyes of each beholder. The different perspectives of these stakeholders often depend upon their unique domain expertise, lifecycle insights, and understanding of the business and operational environment. Since each of these perspectives are valid within the context they were observed, it can be quite difficult to reconcile them into a single pursuit. Yet without focus, precious resources can be squandered on unsustainable paths or fatal dead ends.
Since the intersection of these factors can be small,, creation of new things requires the creators to embark on a voyage of discovery, with cycles of concurrent experimentation, evaluation, learning, and luck. In his book on the power of adaption, author Tim Harford describes this search for value as a journey across an unfamiliar solution landscape: Read more »
Types of changes
Administrative
Contingent
Planned
Emergent
Affordable reliability
Reliability is a system attribute that characterizes a system's performance under defined loads over time. In practice, it is applied in several unique, but related, situations to represent:
- Fitness for use
- Capacity and resistance to failure
- Gracefulness of degradation with loss of function (i.e. without having catastrophic consequences)
- The likelihood that a required function will be available when needed
Reliability assessments (and similar architectural features) should seek the sweet spot between the costs of appraisals and the benefits form countermeasures which will likely result from them. To achieve this objective, realistic requirements which are appropriate to the situation need to be established, an effective implementation approach for these requirements must be developed and executed, and validation must be performed to assure that the system meets those requirements. Read more »