Technical Coaching for IT Organizational Transformation
Technical Coaching for IT Organizational Transformation
About the Book
The technical side of organizational transformation often receives insufficient attention, leaving organizations with great market insight, innovative ideas, ambitious plans, clear priorities, a streamlined structure, efficient processes...and no way to execute.
After countless attempted transformations, process adoptions, and framework implementations, it seems as if little progress has been made. The world continues to suffer from poorly-designed, badly-behaved, costly, and hard-to-maintain applications and systems.
The ongoing problem is due in part to management consultants and client leadership underestimating the importance (and the difficulty) of technical improvement to support business goals, in part to the tendency to approach change mechanically, without proper consideration of the humanity of those involved, in part to ineffective coaching methods at the team level, and in part to the global shortage of well-qualified technical coaches.
This book offers suggested remedies for common anti-patterns in organizational transformation programs, clarifies the range of skills a qualified technical coach must cultivate (going well beyond technical skills), and describes a practical way to make gradual, step-by-step progress with improvement guided by appropriate metrics.
Table of Contents
-
- About the Author
-
Preface
- Notes On the Second Edition
-
0 | Introduction
- 0.1 | What’s the Problem?
- 0.2 | Who’s the Audience?
- 0.3 | What’s the Scope?
- 0.4 | Anything new here?
- 0.5 | A Note on Agile
-
Part 1: Foundations
-
1 | Is Transformation Possible?
- 1.1 | A Longstanding Problem
- 1.2 | If Organizations Changed Before, They Can Change Again
- 1.3 | If We Can Find the Dots, We Can Connect Them
- 1.4 | The Missing Element
-
2 | Anti-Patterns of Organizational Transformation
- 2.1 | Incomplete Solutions
- 2.2 | Misalignment of Goals
- 2.3 | Lack of Direction
- 2.4 | Separation of Process-related and Technical Improvements
- 2.5 | Misunderstanding the Nature of the Work
- 2.6 | Conflating business agility with agile software development
- 2.7 | Reintroduction of the Old
- 2.8 | Inappropriate Organizational Structures
- 2.9 | Big-bang Change Rather Than Incremental Change
- 2.10 | Rigid Interpretation of Frameworks
- 2.11 | Milestone-driven vs. Directional Approach
- 2.12 | The Cult of Scrum
- 2.13 | The Soft Stuff Is the Hard Stuff
-
3 | Definitions
- 3.1 | Capabilities
- 3.2 | Leverage
-
1 | Is Transformation Possible?
-
Part 2: Strategy
-
4 | Connecting Management and Technical Consulting
- 4.1 | Half a Solution Isn’t Better Than None
- 4.2 | A Proposed Solution
- 4.3 | The Fulcrum Is the Natural Dividing Line
- 4.4 | Connecting the Parts
- 5 | Begin With the End in Mind
- 6 | Target States: Where Do We Need To Be?
- 7 | Leverage: Where’s the Fulcrum?
-
8 | Getting Started
- 8.1 | Impact: Structure, Process, Practices
- 8.2 | Full-Stack Slices
- 8.3 | Up-Front Analysis
- 8.4 | Foundational Activities
- 8.5 | Starting Iterative Improvement
- 9 | The Cycle of Change
-
10 | Monitoring Progress
- 10.1. | Anti-Patterns In Monitoring Progress
- 10.2 | When Should We Check Progress?
- 10.3 | How Should We Check Progress?
- 10.4 | Metrics and Managed Change
- 10.5 | Cultivating Continuous Improvement
-
11 | Metrics
- 11.1 | Process-Agnostic Metrics
- 11.2 | Directional Metrics
- 11.3 | Measuring Capabilities
- 11.6 | Measuring Stability of Production Operations
- 11.7 | Measuring Software Quality
- 11.8 | Measuring Code Health
- 11.9 | What Not To Measure
-
12 | Structures and Responsibilities
- 12.1 | Structures Specific to the Transformation
- 12.2 | Consultancy Responsibilities
- 12.3 | Client Responsibilities
- 12.4 | Joint Responsibilities
- 12.5 | Consultant and Coach Responsibilities
- 12.6 | Special Consideration for Technical Coaches
-
4 | Connecting Management and Technical Consulting
-
Part 3 | Humanity
- 13 | A Chair Is a Resource
- 14 | Holding Precious What It Is To Be Human
-
15 | Safety
- 15.1 | The Business Value of Safety
- 15.2 | Putting People First
- 15.3 | Importance of Safety in Times of Change
-
16 | Responsibility Over Accountability
- 16.1 | Accountability
- 16.2 | Responsibility
-
17 | Stress
- 17.1 | Allow for Stress and Its Effects
- 17.2 | Your Helpers Are Human, Too
- 17.3 | Hold Course Despite Stress
-
18 | Introversion and Collaboration
- 18.1 | What is Introversion?
- 18.2 | Can’t Introverts Just Get Over It?
- 18.3 | Making It Work
- 18.4 | Introversion and Coaching
-
19 | Cognitive Biases
- 19.1 | Categorizing Cognitive Biases
- 19.2 | Confirmation Bias
- 19.3 | Gambler’s Fallacy
- 19.4 | Sunk Cost Fallacy
- 19.5 | Negativity Bias
- 19.6 | The Illusion of Explanatory Depth
- 20 | Ego Development
- 21 | View of Authority
-
22 | Profiling
- 22.1 | Pigeon-holing
- 22.2 | Defamation
- 22.3 | Excuses
- 22.4 | Monoculture
- 22.5 | The Slippery Slope to a Toxic Culture
- 22.6 | Be a Grown-Up
- 22.7 | People Can Grow (Resources Can’t)
-
23 | Organizational Culture
- 23.1 | What Is Organizational Culture?
- 23.2 | How Is Organizational Culture Used?
- 23.3 | A Systems View of Organizational Culture
- 23.4 | Stop Worrying About Culture
-
24 | Client-Consultant Relations
- 24.1 | Factors Resulting in Sensitivity
- 24.2 | Earning and Maintaining Trust
- 24.3 | Who’s the Boss?
- 24.4 | Ensure Common Understanding
-
Part 4: Change
-
25 | Intentional Change
- 25.1 | Current and Target Operating States
- 25.2 | Missing Pieces
- 25.3 | “How to Change” Doesn’t Mean “How to Implement”
- 25.4 | Stepwise Improvement vs. Predefined End State
-
26 | Initial Changes
- 26.1 | Establish Collaborative Workspaces
- 26.2 | Form Product-Aligned Teams
- 26.3 | Take Baseline Measurements
- 26.4 | Choose Initial Experiments
-
27 | Workspaces for Collaboration
- 27.1 | The Rise of Office Work
- 27.2 | The Action Office
- 27.3 | The Birth of the Cubicle Farm
- 27.4 | The Open-Plan Office
- 27.5 | Collaborative Team Work Spaces
- 27.6 | Considerations for Remote Workers
- 27.7 | 5S and Software Development
- 27.8 | Gaining Cooperation from Client Leadership
-
28 | Time Management
- 28.1 | Outlook-Driven Development
- 28.2 | Causes of Time Management Issues
- 28.3 | Manager Time vs Maker Time
- 28.4 | Managing the Calendar
- 28.5 | Protecting Maker Time
-
29 | Incrementally Collapsing Functional Silos
- 29.1 | Initial Organizational Structure
- 29.2 | Starting Point
- 29.3 | Organizational Constraints on Silo-Busting
- 29.4 | Temporary Scaffolding
- 29.5 | First Steps in Silo-Busting
- 29.5 | Special Considerations When Decentralizing Responsibility
- 29.6 | Team Size
- 29.7 | Security
- 29.8 | Summary
-
30 | Incrementally Improving Estimation
- 30.1 | Who Needs to Estimate?
- 30.2 | Factors Affecting Estimation
- 30.3 | Incremental Improvement
-
31 | Incrementally Improving Code Review
- 31.1 | The Value of Code Review
- 31.2 | From No Code Review to Formal Code Review
- 31.3 | Use Checklists
- 31.4 | Limit the Time of Formal Code Reviews
- 31.5 | Refactor to Increase Review Effectiveness
- 31.6 | From Formal Code Review to Pair/Mob Programming
- 31.7 | Use Static Code Analysis
-
32 | Incrementally Improving Branching Strategy
- 32.1 | Types of Version Control Systems
- 32.2 | One or Multiple Version Control Systems
- 32.3 | One or Multiple Source Repositories
- 32.4 | Branching Strategies
- 32.5 | Challenges In Scaling
- 32.6 | Typical Starting Points
- 32.7 | Step By Step Improvement
- 32.8 | Pitfalls and Anti-Patterns
-
33 | Improving Infrastructure Support & Operations
- 33.2 | Infrastructure Management Options
- 33.2.1 | Stress
- 33.3 | Leading Practices in Operations
- 33.4 | Busting the Final Silos Within Each Technology Stack
- 33.5 | Special Considerations for Mainframe Teams
-
25 | Intentional Change
-
Part 5: Coaching
-
34 | Coaching Skills
- 34.1 | Coaching Competencies
- 34.2 | Self-Awareness and Empathy
- 34.3 | Course of Least Resistance
- 34.4 | Make Things Visible
- 34.5 | Manipulation
- 34.6 | Acting
- 34.7 | Removing Organizational Constraints
- 34.8 | Let the Team Stumble
- 34.9 | Be the Rock
- 34.10 | Conflict Resolution
- 34.11 | Principles-Based Adaptation
- 34.12 | Having Multiple Ways to Explain Things
- 34.13 | Awareness of Context
- 34.14 | Knowing When To Quit
-
35 | Shortage of Technical Coaches
- 35.1 | Availability of Technical Coaches
- 35.2 | A Note on Agile Coaches
- 35.3 | Tailored Approaches
-
36 | Technical Coaching Approach
- 36.1 | Problems With the Status Quo
- 36.2 | Addressing the Problems
- 36.3 | Team-Level Technical Coaching Model
- 36.4 | Scaling the Coaching Model
- 36.5 | Developing Internal Technical Coaches
- 36.6 | Barriers to Adoption
-
37 | Communication Models
- 37.1 | Active Listening
- 37.2 | Appreciative Inquiry
- 37.3 | Clean Language
- 37.4 | Crucial Conversations
- 37.5 | Emotional Intelligence
- 37.6 | Getting To Yes
- 37.7 | Mindful Kindness
- 37.8 | Powerful Questions
- 37.9 | Radical Candor
-
38 | Collaboration
- 38.1 | Improving Collaboration Improves Flow
- 38.2 | Team Cohesiveness
-
39 | Internalities
- 39.1 | Beginner’s Mind
- 39.2 | Eye of the Hurricane
- 39.3 | Non-Attachment
- 39.4 | Nonviolent Communication
- 39.5 | The Four Agreements
-
34 | Coaching Skills
-
Part 6 | Summary
-
Appendix A | IBM Mainframe Considerations
- A.1 | Mainframe UNIX Support
- A.2 | Mainframe ASCII Support
- A.3 | Mainframe as Cloud Host Environment
- A.4 | Legacy Applications and IBM Z Cloud Features
- A.5 | Test Automation and Test-Driven Development
- Appendix B | Glossary
- Appendix C | References
-
Appendix D | Picture Credits
- Cover Art
- Figures
- Index
-
Appendix A | IBM Mainframe Considerations
The Leanpub 60-day 100% Happiness Guarantee
Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.
See full terms
Do Well. Do Good.
Authors have earned$11,580,376writing, publishing and selling on Leanpub, earning 80% royalties while saving up to 25 million pounds of CO2 and up to 46,000 trees.
Learn more about writing on Leanpub
Free Updates. DRM Free.
If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).
Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers), EPUB (for phones and tablets) and MOBI (for Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.
Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.
Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them
Top Books
SignalR on .NET 6 - the Complete Guide
Fiodar SazanavetsLearn everything there is to learn about SignalR and how to integrate it with the latest .NET 6 and C# 10 features. Learn how to connect any type of client to SignalR, including plain WebSocket client. Learn how to build interactive applications that can communicate with each other in real time without making excessive calls.
The easiest way to learn design patterns
Fiodar SazanavetsLearn design patterns in the easiest way possible. You will no longer have to brute-force your way through each one of them while trying to figure out how it works. The book provides a unique methodology that will make your understanding of design patterns stick. It can also be used as a reference book where you can find design patterns in seconds.
Agile Testing Condensed Japanese Edition
Yuya Kazama, Janet Gregory, and Lisa CrispinJanet GregoryとLisa Crispinによる2019年9月発行の書籍『Agile Testing Condensed』の日本語翻訳版です。アジャイルにおいてどのような考えでテストを行うべきなのか簡潔に書かれています!
OpenIntro Statistics
David Diez, Christopher Barr, Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel, and OpenIntroA complete foundation for Statistics, also serving as a foundation for Data Science.
Leanpub revenue supports OpenIntro (US-based nonprofit) so we can provide free desk copies to teachers interested in using OpenIntro Statistics in the classroom and expand the project to support free textbooks in other subjects.
More resources: openintro.org.
Functional event-driven architecture: Powered by Scala 3
Gabriel VolpeExplore the event-driven architecture (EDA) in a purely functional way, mainly powered by Fs2 streams in Scala 3!
Leverage your functional programming skills by designing and writing stateless microservices that scale, powered by stateful message brokers.
Tech Giants in Healthcare
Dr. Bertalan MeskoThis comprehensive guide, Tech Giants in Healthcare, clarifies how and why big tech companies step into healthcare, and breaks it down from one market player to the other in what direction they are going, what tools they are using and what horizons they have in front of them.
Ansible for DevOps
Jeff GeerlingAnsible is a simple, but powerful, server and configuration management tool. Learn to use Ansible effectively, whether you manage one server—or thousands.
Recipes for Decoupling
Matthias NobackCCIE Service Provider Version 4 Written and Lab Exam Comprehensive Guide
Nicholas RussoThe service provider landscape has changed rapidly over the past several years. Networking vendors are continuing to propose new standards, techniques, and procedures for overcoming new challenges while concurrently reducing costs and delivering new services. Cisco has recently updated the CCIE Service Provider track to reflect these changes; this book represents the author's personal journey in achieving that certification.
The BDD Books - Discovery (Japanese Edition)
Gáspár Nagy, Seb Rose, and Yuya Kazamaウクライナ難民を支援 - 2022年5月末まで延長!
この本の売り上げの50%は、 https://unicef.hu/veszhelyzet-ukrajnaban と https://int.depaulcharity.org/fundraising-for-depaul-ukraine/ に寄付されます。
本書籍は、振る舞い駆動開発(Behavior Driven Development, BDD)や受け入れテスト駆動開発(Acceptance Test-Driven Development, ATDD)の発見フェーズを最大限に活用する方法を提供します。
Top Bundles
- #1
All the Books of The Medical Futurist
6 Books
We put together the most popular books from The Medical Futurist to provide a clear picture about the major trends shaping the future of medicine and healthcare. Digital health technologies, artificial intelligence, the future of 20 medical specialties, big pharma, data privacy, digital health investments and how technology giants such as Amazon... - #2
Practical FP in Scala + Functional event-driven architecture
2 Books
Practical FP in Scala (A hands-on approach) & Functional event-driven architecture, aka FEDA, (Powered by Scala 3), together as a bundle! The content of PFP in Scala is a requirement to understand FEDA so why not take advantage of this bundle!? - #3
CCIE Service Provider Ultimate Study Bundle
2 Books
Piotr Jablonski, Lukasz Bromirski, and Nick Russo have joined forces to deliver the only CCIE Service Provider training resource you'll ever need. This bundle contains a detailed and challenging collection of workbook labs, plus an extensively detailed technical reference guide. All of us have earned the CCIE Service Provider certification... - #5
Pattern-Oriented Memory Forensics and Malware Detection
2 Books
This training bundle for security engineers and researchers, malware and memory forensics analysts includes two accelerated training courses for Windows memory dump analysis using WinDbg. It is also useful for technical support and escalation engineers who analyze memory dumps from complex software environments and need to check for possible... - #6
Software Architecture for Developers: Volumes 1 & 2 - Technical leadership and communication
2 Books
"Software Architecture for Developers" is a practical and pragmatic guide to modern, lightweight software architecture, specifically aimed at developers. You'll learn:The essence of software architecture.Why the software architecture role should include coding, coaching and collaboration.The things that you really need to think about before... - #8
Modern C++ Collection
3 Books
Get All about Modern C++C++ Standard Library, including C++20Concurrency with Modern C++, including C++20C++20Each book has about 200 complete code examples. Updates are included. When I update one of the books, you immediately get the updated bundle. You can expect significant updates to each new C++ standard (C++23, C++26, .. ) and also... - #9
Linux Administration Complet
4 Books
Ce lot comprend les quatre volumes du Guide Linux Administration :Linux Administration, Volume 1, Administration fondamentale : Guide pratique de préparation aux examens de certification LPIC 1, Linux Essentials, RHCSA et LFCS. Administration fondamentale. Introduction à Linux. Le Shell. Traitement du texte. Arborescence de fichiers. Sécurité...