ROI
Hello!
Welcome to another week. I hope you had a great time resting. Last Saturday we went with my wife to watch Ed Sheeran live! It was a fantastic show and one of the previous dates of his US tour.
As usual, these are my incomplete thoughts. Later, I'll come around to further delve deeper into this topic. I find it very interesting, and I constantly see it at play.
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I was thinking about "investments" we've done in our organizations as I'm preparing a "deep dive," I wanted to call out which investments we did in the past, which are happening, and what we plan on having in the future. Many times and times again, I've come across investments that never returned anything beyond learning.
The organizations didn't manage to stop them. They either didn't become aware of them on time or needed to have the tools to assess the impact of such investments meaningfully.
Why do we make these technology investments?
Organizations pay the price, as Marco Rogers calls out, in time, money, and effort. The times I found out about them and started working backward to figure out what happened, it generally started with an engineer or a team interested in a new hyped technology.
In other cases, a bored, burned-out, or both team or engineer will work "randomly" to reduce velocity for the team but will be putting up a proof-of-concept (sometimes even more). Whenever they present it, the personal investment and the sunk cost will be significant, so the team or manager won't be able to say no.
It's the sort of "silver bullet" that will solve the issue they're facing end to end. There are no other options, and not one stands a chance at such an incredible solution.
Other times, I've seen managers look at it as an opportunity to say their team is innovative and breaking ground. And allow everyone to put it on their resume. Perhaps your company or organization has much of this "resume-driven development," so only adopting new technologies promotes people. While crucial, people in the organization can help mitigate this by talking people out of simply introducing new technology based on hype or out of boredom.
How can we improve this investment analysis?
I've been thinking that while we can introduce more processes to assess these investments, as I talked about later, the reality is that choosing boring tech or buying instead of building is certainly not "cool" when improving resumes or working on greenfield projects.
If your team is bored or, worse, burned out, you'll need to think more deeply about how to solve that before introducing more processes that will make people attempt to circumvent it in multiple ways.
What can we do to improve the investment analysis?
How do we scale this out? One approach I've started to think about and apply is the adoption of a "technology radar," the ThoughtWorks artifact. It can be something other than that specifically, but it is a tool that lets your teams discern among technologies and their adoption status in the organization. For example: "experiment,” “adopt,” “hold,” and “retire.”
Effectively, if your technology of choice is not on the radar, it needs to be analyzed to see if it is possible to start experimenting with it. This can help keep teams accountable for the decisions and risks they introduce to the organization when adopting new technologies.
Another option is the introduction of Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) and their encompassing process, weekly reviews, stakeholder reviews, etc.
Your turn!
Have you seen this behavior? Have you done something like this? I know I've had. It's hard to acknowledge the shiny new thing is driving you. Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email!
Happy coding!
Things I discovered in the past week
- I came across this repository that has material on a system design course. I found it interesting, and I shared it with my mentees.
- Obsidian CEO vault template is a good article; I like reading the thoughts behind structuring your notes app. I currently use the PARA method, but it doesn't match 100% my workflow.
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