Tuesday, August 15, 2006

SOA is about people, or why you need admin support

One of my favourite tech books in recent years has been Tom DeMarco's Slack which outlines how organisations have removed their flexibility by not giving people slack time in which to do things beyond their normal job.


I realised on seeing it on my shelf the other day that this is one of the things that I've often not stressed when advising people on doing SOA to give themself more agility, namely making sure that people have time in which to be more agile. Its impossible for people to think about new ways of working or try out new options if all of their time is 100% allocated to doing the day-to-day.

It is a critical success factor in making any organisation more agile or dynamic, certainly not limited to SOA, people need time in which to become flexible and to think about new ideas. They don't need to be tracked to the nth degree so they have no available time in which to actually add the extra value that the company is so keen to get. Its got some great information and case studies/gems that you can use to justify and explain how having time dedicated to "nothing" actually helps you to deliver to the company what the company really wants you to do.

SOA success is all about the people and to get that flexibility they are going to need Slack.

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1 comment:

miko said...

yeah but look out for slackers. Just kidding. I agree with you, you will need some slack.

Miko