Category Archives: Stakeholders

The Missing Slide

Requirements, Stakeholders

It’s been a few months since I presented on continuous integration configuration and other automation principles at  SwampUp 2017 in Napa, CA.  Now that I’ve had time to reflect on feedback from both attendees and online viewers, I have discovered one important concept was missing from the presentation.  I will call it the missing slide and present it here.

The concept I missed was tying the seven automation projects back to the stakeholders who benefited; an easy slide to omit since the entire reason for this blog is my passion for shifting my industry away from the very prevalent, “fight for my favorite tools” approach to selecting technology – a common occurrence in software configuration management and DevOps.  I wasn’t there to present software configuration management basics, so the oversight is due the fact that I advocate for a principle of “stakeholder analysis” when designing configuration management systems.  I consider this on of the most basic SCM principles and should have included it even though I was focused on presenting the advanced concepts like self-configuring pipelines.  Here is the missing slide:

As you can see, a wide variety of stakeholders benefit from the automation projects I talked about in the presentation.  Here are some stakeholder needs met by this project.

  • Development teams understand the impact of changes to specific modules.
  • Escalation teams are able to build and test hot fixes for customer defects.
  • Third party, open source library review boards know which dependencies are being changed.
  • QA and test teams understand component changes for regression test planning.
  • Artifact repository administrators are able to trash artifacts without removing the important ones.
  • Legal team knows escrow requirements have been met.
  • Developers know builds are triggering correctly.

The list goes on, but you get the idea.

My specific solution may not be right for your organization, but I hope you can learn from it.  If your stakeholders differ from mine, you will need to adjust accordingly.  A prepackaged software development organization has different requirements from a hosted service organization and is different from a retailer maintain a customer website.  There are a lot of stakeholders in my world.

Who are the stakeholders your team serves?

SCM is DISC made Easy

Implementation, Stakeholders

 

Understanding DISC profiling is easy when you are thinking about it, but did you know there was an easy way to figure out someone’s primary DISC profile letter with reasonable accuracy? I figured this out and created a handy chart to show how it works.  All that’s needed to figure out where someone fits on the two main dimensions of DISC – global vs linear and data vs people.  Quickly understanding where people fit is important because SCM is DISC .

I like to figure out the global vs linear dimension by asking one simple question, “Is it more important to do things fast or to do things right?”  The jet fighter pilots and rock stars need to do things fast; get home without being shot down or keep from getting booed off the stage.  The chess players and long-term care nurses must do things right; win the game or keep the patient happy.

 

The people vs data dimension is found by looking at the subject and object of someone’s writing or actions.  The jet fighter pilots and chess players are data focused; gauges full of data or consequences of possible moves.  The rock stars and long-term care nurses are people focused; audience is cheering or patient is feeling good.

Sources of answers to these questions include conversations like email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  Learning how to profile quickly makes me a better Software Configuration Management engineer.  Let me know if it works for you.

SCM is DISC made Easy