Weeknote 19th July 2024

Lots of stuff about team working and a little about the global technology outage.

I hope you managed to avoid the worst impacts of the Crowdstrike outage. It would be nice to think that a positive side-effect will be to raise awareness of the weaknesses of technology and the important of security and contingency planning. I fear that this won’t be the case. There is already too much talk about preventing this from “ever happening again” and what should be done about the incompetent individuals or organisations responsible. That sort of binary thinking is unhelpful and could make things even worse. We can take steps to reduce frequency of these sorts of thing and reduce the impact when they happen but thinking the risk can be reduced to zero is fanciful. Risk reduction involves money and effort that can also be put to other good uses and careful trade-offs are required.

This is an area where some regulation could be helpful. Not the kind that mandates how individuals and organisations make these trade-offs but the type that insists the decisions are made explicitly and transparently. That is plenty for a weeknote but one of my old blog posts has more on this kind of thing.

Lots of my work this week touched upon how teams work in isolation, how they work together and why teams are the shape and size that they are. Occasionally, we deliberately design teams. We generally do this for formal teams that you can see in our organisation structure. It takes a lot of effort and once it is done these teams tend to get locked in place by role profiles, budget allocations and management hierarchies. If we learn new things or circumstances change it can be hard the change these teams to fit.

We also have teams that are less formal that are put together for projects, initiatives or to provide specific functions such as governance. These teams can be easier to adjust to new things but we rarely take as much care in designing them, thinking through how they will work or creating the best possible environment for team members to work together.

This week I’ve worked with a variety of teams of different shapes and sizes. Here are some examples of the team challenges that have come up this week.

• We needed some extra capacity for some work so we got some help from a supplier. Their staff worked as a team but also needed to collaborate with people in several of our services. This work was to create some outputs required by a large project. The outputs would become the inputs for other teams that make new systems and proceses for our services. Representatives from all of these work together in light touch teams to coordinate the work or to provide governance or assurance. Just making sure all of these people know enough about what is going on to collaborate well is a challenge.
• Depending upon how you count these things we have between 15 and 20 product teams within our IT function. Most of these could be described as “secondary” products. Our primary products are services such as waste collection, social care and housing. Our IT products provide tools and internal services needed to make our primary products work well. There are advantages to splitting this this way such as pooling scarce specialist skills but it makes it hard to keep priorities aligned and ration out these scarce skills to the most valuable work.
• The council has a pretty good grasp of strategy and our ultimate direction is well thought through. There are multiple paths to reach our end goals and paths offer different trade-offs. For example, some paths offer a faster route to the end-goal but at the cost of some short term customer impact. Other paths provide an immediate positive customer impact but increase the time and cost required to reach the end goal. It is quite reasonable for people to disagree over which is the best path. Our habits are to escalate these disagreements up the management hierarchy to exceptionally busy managers who won’t have such a rich understanding of the trade-offs involved. Teams at a lower level are quite capable of negotiating and reaching an agreement but, traditionally, we haven’t given people at this level the training and support they need to be feel comfortable with this.