Biography

Mark Smalley, also known as The IT Paradigmologist, thinks, writes, trains and speaks extensively about IT ‘paradigms’ – in other words our changing perspectives on IT. Such as DevOps. Mark is a Trainer/Consultant at Smalley.IT and Master Trainer for GamingWorks’ The Phoenix Project DevOps business simulation. He is Global Ambassador at the DevOps Agile Skills Association (DASA). He has contributed to various IT industry bodies of knowledge.

The Great Escape from Project Plan Prison

Do you feel trapped in Project Plan Prison? Do you have to report to the Project Warden about meaningless milestones to give him or her the illusion of control? Is the project plan is based on naive and idealised assumptions, so that you have to dig a tunnel to escape from fantasy to do the real work?
Much IT work is too unpredictable to be described in detail in project plans. Things just happen, so we have to experiment. This is a natural characteristic of the Complex Adaptive Systems that we increasingly have to deal with.
This session is based on the Cynefin sense-making framework that is widely adopted by DevOps communities.
The takeaways are that it helps you:
– diagnose which kind of ‘system’ you are in (ordered, complex or chaotic)
– act effectively in each of these domains
– liberate yourself from restrictive process and project constructs