Crafting Engineering Strategy

Chapter 10. Operations

Even the best policies fail if the teams they’re intended to serve don’t adopt them. Can you persistently change your company’s behaviors with a one-time announcement? No, probably not.

I refer to the art of making policies work as operations or strategy operations. The good news is that effectively operating a policy is two-thirds avoiding common practices that simply don’t work. The other one-third takes some repetition, but can be practiced in any engineering role: there’s no need to wait until you’re an executive to start building mastery.

This chapter will dig into those mechanisms, with particular focus on:

• How operations support policies with mechanisms that ensure they work well

• Evaluating operational mechanisms to select the most effective choice

• Composing an operational plan to support your specific set of policies

• Operations mechanisms, effective and otherwise, including approval forums, inspection mechanisms, and nudges

• How to adjust your approach to operations if you are in an engineering role

• The largest threat to effective strategy operations: cargo-culting

Let’s unpack the details of making sure your potentially good policy has a positive impact. In addition to showing you how to roll out a strategy of your own, this chapter also provides a rescue toolkit you can use to put an existing, floundering strategy back on track. If you don’t see an opportunity to write new strategy within your organization, then there’s still probably ...