Chapter 5. Building Leadership Through Decider Groups

Who

  • Technical Leads

  • Engineers

  • Enabling Team Leads

  • CxOs

  • Managers

Why

Real agility lies in the ability of organizations to decide and react quickly. Often our natural organizational communication channels are structured in ways that inhibit the people closest to the problem to act in ways that are nimble and aligned with the business. Centralized communication patterns create organizational bottlenecks that stifle progress and innovation. Top-down methods of decision making push authority to people who frequently have less direct knowledge or context for making well-informed decisions.

To have agile projects and development breakthroughs, it’s necessary to allow for easy structure and restructure of communication channels and information exchange patterns to push decision-making activities to people who are best informed. This runs contrary to common hierarchical habits of pushing information up to those with the authority to make decisions.

DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) regularly analyzes many companies to determine what practices lead to companies’ success. The 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps Report established four key findings related to organizational decision making. Two state that agility and communication patterns are critical elements to leading technological transformation, and two state that increased productivity and change management processes are factors ...

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