Organisation Smells

Description

You know about Code Smells? How about Organisation Smells? What are bod signs and are there things we can do about them?

The goal of the session is to come up with a good smells and bad smells checklist (possibly with other taxonomies) of things to look out for in an organisation.

The idea was also floated to phrase them in such a way that you could ask about them during an interview.

Raw dump of board from session

Items submitted by the workshop folks:

(These were ones considered to be ok to put directly in as a checkbox item)

• (neg) Product owner coming up with features without discussions
• (neg) Hidden Salaries
• (pos) Including engineers in roadmap planning
• (neg) Requriements too abstract
  • (action) Ask Questions and seek clarification
• (neg) Cherry picking devs to do tasks
• (pos) Leadership is reachable and acts on feedback
• (neg) Management is absent
  • (action) Take the lead
• (neg) New work everyday/frequently changing focus/no overall plan

(Other feedback items which might do with more fleshing out and converting to tickbox items)

• (neg) No time for experimentation
• (pos) 10% time
• (pos) Generous Training Budget
• (neg) "Work Hard , Pay Hard" Mentality with mandatory parties
• (neg) Sign off Madness
• (neg) Risk Theater / Ass covering
• (neg) Not Quality driven just delivery driven
• (neg) Lack of collaboration between teams
  • (action) Align incentives of decision makers
• (neg) Team members in different locations who never meet in person
• (neg) Nothing (person or process) to resolve conflicts / contradictions between Silos
• (pos) Team participate in the discovery of the product (Story mapping, event storming gherkin)
• (neg) Prioritising team's work over organisational goals
• (pos) Company retros
• (neg) Rather beg forgiveness than ask permission
• (pos) Transparency
• (neg) Negative (re) enforcement
• (neg) Overprotectiveness of one's code & other resources
• (pos) Regular updates on company "health"
• (pos) Organisational goals are well communicated & understood
• (neg) Dictat not discussion
• (neg) Orders without explanation
• (neg) Hoarding of information
• (neg) Information Hiding
• (neg) No open critique
• (neg) Deadline as method of enforcement
• (neg) Dishonesty
• (neg) Coping with growth by adding a layers of beauracracy
• (neg) BAs write big features then don't engage with fleshing them out
• (neg) Trying to do too much
• (neg) Teams being ordered to work in ways that they know suck
• (neg) Companies who thrive on or force uniformity across all teams (Tools, process, frameworks)
• (neg) Carrying on with projects against the advice of engineers
• (neg) Policies that only benefit policy makers
• (neg) Things are moving slowly
• (neg) Management ignorant of the domain they are managing
• (neg) Artificial harmony (pretending everything is fine)
  • (action) Build a culture of respectful conflict
• (neg) Management enforces a policy when nobody knows the context of the policy
• (neg) Prioritising loud (large) customer over smaller but more numerous customers
• (neg) Ask for permission to write tests
  • (action) Don't ask - you are the technical expert
  • (action) Do it anyway
  • (action) Run away!
• (neg) People disappearing with no notice to teams (no email about person leaving)
• (neg) High turnover / low turnover

A group split out to cover some Psychological Safety issues Top level items the pulled out:

• (pos) People talking about how they feel
• (pos) Openly admitting ignorance / mistakes especially senior people being vulnerabe
• (pos) Collegues being friends
• (pos) Retro safety checks / prime directive
• (neg) Tolerating bad behaviour from "Good" people / rockstars
• (neg) Blaming
• (neg) Being Scared

Individual items from the PS sub category:

• (neg) Cannot be vulnerable

• (neg) Lack of trust (No safety , Blame culture)

• (neg) Culture of fear

• (neg) Crappy behaviour (bullying etc) tolerated from "Brilliant" people

• (pos) Caring about people

• (pos) Colleagues are also friends

• (pos) People talk about how they feel

• (pos) Can openly admit ignorance

• Politics over productivity

  • Empire Building
  • Rewarding non productive staff

• Lower Precision (Ranged Estimates)

  • 4% Accuracy Estimation
  • Management by Metrics
  • Change Plans / Temas without involving the people who are affected
  • Too much quantitative (£$€) and too little qualitative thinking

• Personal development

  • Coding dojo sessions every day
  • 'Today I learned' slack channel (knowledge sharing)

• No actionable postit

  • Welcomes suggestions from people outside the team
  • Business morals dying as a startup grows
  • Accountability with responsibility/authority
  • Too much architect layers before dev
  • Not enough / too much team focus