The world of work has seen many changes in the last hundred years.  So much so that for many, the reference materials just aren't working any longer.  If the work your company endeavors to do is uncertain, experimental, prone to changing conditions or likely to encounter many learns along the way such as most IT work does then you may be losing up to 90cents on every dollar you spend based on a few common management practices that were made famous only 20 and 30 years ago.

If it were so easy as to only build those products and features that customers most want.  Then there is no way we would still be faced with a staggering 65% of the products and features we build no one wants.  They don't solve the right problem, or in the right way.  They don't help the user to feel smart, and powerful and able to accomplish so much more as perhaps the physical tractors or assembly line automation does.

Cloud native, micro-service architectures, automated deployment/testing/delivery pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, Security as Code, Serverless Functions, 

When you are faced with the highly unknown, highly unknowable work life of an aggressively modern IT organization you find cross-functional teams at their heart.  Teams aren't people who just work together.  Teams are people who trust one another and together can participate in the business and the delivery organization to get from idea to market effectively. 

When 20 or 60 or 5,000 people want to cooperate on a task, it is very expensive to try and do that in person.  When that task is the overall improvement of our organization, management, leadership, craftsmanship and the like, it is harder and more important.  By building and participating in internal and external communities of practice organizations can build effective habits, patterns of behavior and results in this area seemingly for free.

 To give ones life in the service of others that they may have cumulatively more success because of it is a big deal.  It is also a thankless, hard, always shifting deal.  Stuck in the middle the air is thin, and both sides often seem at odds.  How do you build a best places to work culture while also keeping the executives from running us into a wall or the production line from grinding to a halt?

Internally organizations can leverage a technique large scale non for profits have used for decades, only the organization can do it a little better.  By setting up the digital ponds and pseudo-spaces for like minded/skilled individuals to begin to find one another and become organized and by putting the right collection of tools on the table for them to pull from you can begin to capture an amazing amount of natural upskilling, positive energy, cause for celebration and new places for learning to being to form.

For all of the work that matters, this is the new recipe for success.  For all the other work, do what you will.  The Agile Dojo is a fantastic way to help breakup technical departments, force the issues with cross-functional teams and invite the supporting parts of the organization into the room with the developing parts to learn/agree upon a sustainable way of working together that feels good to both sides.  

It has been one heck of a ride and I appreciate all the opportunities that remain to visit its sorted past.  When given the option however, I am enjoying TypeScript/Angular/Material, NetCore, SignalR, Postgres, BDD, CentOS-Apache quite a bit these days.

Yea, and there will be more 3 letter combinations before were done!  We have been saying it for years.  Companies that build software or engage in other expensive high creative / high engineering practices as a primary business model do well to operate as a container for perpetual startups.  The only way to do any of this is to have incredibly high craftsmanship standards and tooling's.  The modern IT organization offloads many of its arcane burdens to the CI/CD pipeline, test automation and code first approaches to infrastructure, security, deployments and more.

Many customers that have been in business for a while are finding the data-center costs and lack of auto-scaling capabilities make the Cloud seem an ideal solution.  Where this is true for some projects, there is a high cost associated with getting from where you are today, to a place that would be "cloud native" enough to produce an ROI.  We do help many people step into their cloud lift-and-shift, then cloud-refactoring journey but we help many more to begin preparing for the cloud by taking better advantage of the bare metal solution providers they already partner with and focusing on those technical challenges that will otherwise push the cloud to be a huge cost drain.