Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen's blog

This is another follow-up post on my first year at eyeo . In a company where the norm was to shun any hype, and avoiding cargo-culting by all means, it was not easy to use the language I had come to learn in the industry. Mentioning "Agile" would derail any discussion into shoot-downs, anecdotes and personal opinions and experiences. Few of the agile values, principles or practices were taken at face value. The more experienced colleagues had bad experiences with "agile transformations", and the large majority of younger colleagues had not recognized the pains of silofication , nor experienced the joy of successful organizational change. As is the norm these days, "DevOps" has already been reduced to infrastructure engineering. Scrum was a fad, XP forgotten, Kanban was a board on the wall. Sprints were pointless, we'd rather ship when there's a big enough reason to ship. Conway's and Little's laws were unknown, as were Lean, theory of c

I recently   posted   this sketch on Twitter: Thanks to a few mighty retweets, it gathered a lot of views (9000 impressions, whatever that means). While that's fun and all, I still felt a bit sad that such an awfully simple insight can garner much more popularity than a thorough blog post that I put some hours into. So, rather than let Twitter get away with this, I'll steal my own content back into the blog :) The thread went like this: Pondering how to battle individualism in companies. For some, it is counter-intuitive that teams can be more responsive, faster and even more accountable than single individuals. Having "teams" in place is no guarantee that team work is happening. Be wary of too large teams, "I/me/mine", personal contact details instead of team point of contact. Good team is sailing crew, not galley slaves. Beware heroes, go-to persons, calling in favors and other shadow handling of work. Real teams make the work explici

Back at uni, we had a semester about IT project management , and one of the highlights was this two-day off-site where we went to a camp and did team-building kind of exercises to explore social dynamics and stuff. One exercise was called "Saboteur". In short, the mission was for the teams to recreate a complicated building block construction set in a different room. The constraint was that each team could only dispatch one person at a certain interval to study the original construction. The goal was to get to the identical structure first. Additionally, each team was "infiltrated" with an unknown amount of saboteurs, tasked with slowing down their teams without revealing their purpose. To counter for this, our team decided to use double-checking observation roundtrips to weed out the saboteur(s). The team members that were found to have provided wrong observations were excluded from making any more observation roundtrips. I remember this girl in particular th

I recently found myself mediating a personal conflict within a team. In this post, I'll share what I quickly had to pick up and learn in order to do so. Disclaimer: I am not a trained professional in conflict handling. If you find yourself in a similar situation, get professional help from a trained mediator and do not try to do anything without the backing of the supervisor(s) of everyone involved! Spotting the conflict I try to keep some tap on the conversations that are happening around the company, and in particular I try sensing conflicts. In this case, I spotted what at first looked like a regular somewhat heated exchange in a distributed team, and then as the discussion continued, the participants started to pull for executives to come in and break the argument in their favor. The topic under discussion was definitely a team-internal thing, so my alarm bell started chiming. This didn't feel like a regular technical discussion. It had an air of threat and desperation

I'm just about ship GitMinutes episode 46, which is going to be the final episode. I'll just paste the outro script here, as it sums up the sentimental thoughts pretty well: I’m happy to have finally finished [publishing the last episodes from Git-Merge 2017], just in time before Git-Merge 2018 takes place in March. I won’t be going there myself, so I’m counting on someone else to pick up the mic there. It’s sad to be shipping this one as it is probably the last GitMinutes episode ever. To go a bit down memory lane, 6 years ago, my daughter was born, and as I used a little of that paternity leave to set up my podcasting infrastructure and produce the first few episodes. Initially it was just going to be 10 episodes and call the experiment finished. Instead, I got to 46 episodes, the last dozen or so lazily tailing the last few Git-Merge conferences. To every one of my guests, thank you so much again for coming on to share your passion in this little niche of computer s

Note: This topic of this post was heavily inspired by The Phoenix Project and the succeeding tome of reference, The DevOps Handbook . There are many metrics out there that can guide you to improve your business, but in the upside-down world of Internet business, many of these can be plain wrong, or at least they do not serve well as guides for what you should be doing. If you measure success by measuring profit, for instance, you'll run out of good will with your users or partners very quickly. Then there are a load of more noble but fuzzy numbers that you can measure by surveying employees or users. Think employee-happiness, etc. While these are definitely useful, they are easy to get wrong, and it's easy to over-do it, causing survey fatigue. They're also hard to trace from cause to effect. It's hard to say which particular company decision lead to some satisfaction rating going down. Take the SWOT analysis  as a particular one of these surveys. It will give yo

In my previous post , I suggested several topics to blog about, based on my experiences of 2017. How Silos Grow was the topic most asked for: This was my initial shock after joining the company. Only a few years after taking off as a startup, the hedges began growing, seemingly almost by themselves, and against the will of the founders. I've worked in silos, and in companies without them, but I haven't been there to witness them coming into existence before. It is a fascinating phenomenon, yet oh, so common. And a killer of great companies. This posts digs into why and how silos happen. It's a bit of a long one, so here's the TL;DR: It is about human nature. Departments are a good thing (for some things). People in different departments are inherently different. The project method is still problematic (and reinforces the silos). Cross-departmental teams should be the first-class organizational unit instead. Although the idea to write this came from my fir