X : You don't like McKinsey?
Me : Gosh, that's astute of you. I thought my venom was a well kept secret.
X : Why McKinsey?
Me : It's not. I view all those large firms as parasites. It's why (when I used to do stuff with Gov) that I wanted a blanket ban on management consultants.
X : Are you working in Gov today?
Me : No. I do a tiny bit of voluntary help.
X : Will you ever?
Me : Unlikely. The conditions would have to be right.
X : Such as?
Me : Make @liammax a Lord, put him in charge of the Cab Office and then I'll bring my brand of Rottweiler Mapping (the destroyer of undeserved value) to Gov. Oh gosh, I do have a bone to pick with so many companies who have clearly taken the Michael over the pandemic.
X : What about waste in the civil service?
Me : Of course there is some but it's usually nowhere near as bad as the private sector. I have a great fondness for the civil service, they mostly suffer from dogma imposed on them by ... management consultants ... grrr, nash, nash.
Me : There was a time when "good enough for Gov" meant the "best of the best". Alas it now seems to mean "we can sell this tat to Gov for inflated prices".
X : What happened?
Me : Dogma of "the market knows best" combined with weakening of challenge over decades.
... it's why I was so pushy (2010-2013) over the need for spend control, the need for challenge. It's the single most important function for creating sustainable change. It's also why I was fairly rabid over any weakening. Lousy name, important function.
X : Weakening of challenge?
Me : When I looked into UK Gov in 2009, what I found was we had outsourced the skills to engineer solutions to the point that we didn't even have the skills to effectively challenge the solutions being proposed by the outsourcerers ...
... this is not unique to Gov, it happens a lot in the private sector. The number of £10M+ "project specification" (that's the bill for the specification not the actual building of the project) I've seen which are not worth the paper they're written on ...
... mostly because people don't understand users, their needs, the components involved, how evolved those components are or they attempt to specify in contract that which cannot be specified (i.e. uncertain) hence guaranteeing massive change control cost overruns.
X : No, I mean weakening of spend control in Gov? The bit that gets you fairly rabid?
Me : The Manzoni era. Don't get me started. Focus forward not backwards. Grrr .... nash, nash.
X : Any suggestions?
Me : On what to do? Introduce spend control - that sort of thing?
X : Yes
Me : Use this doctrine table. Start in phase I, talk with your collective (org, team, whatever) on what the terms mean and how good you are at them. Fix and move up to the next rung.
X : Is that free?
Me : It's all creative commons. Help yourself.
X : Have you seen this - slidebooks.com
Me : Oh god. You get what you pay for? Why is my stuff free?
X : Yes
Me : Can you map?
X : A bit
Me : My purpose is in this map of mapping.

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More from @swardley

14 Jan
X : We need to adapt to our new reality.
Me : A question?
X : Should we start with organisation or operating model first?
Me : Neither. Start with doctrine i.e. basic principles of your company. This will lead you to landcape which will lead you to structure + operating model. Image
X : Don't we need to get the structure right though?
Me : Structure against what? If you don't understand the landscape that you operate in then how do you structure around it? How do you decide what your operating model is? Awareness comes first and that needs those principles.
X : Explain?
Me : Pretend you're running a tea shop (I'm a Brit, I like tea shops). First thing you need to do is to know who your users are - the public, the business for example (there are more like regulators etc). Image
Read 13 tweets
14 Jan
Well, this is an opportunity for the Gov to show whether they really are "One Nation Tories" (don't hold your breath) or not. Executives and consultants planning "fire and hire" whilst key workers are going into COVID homes to help people .... not good, disgraceful ->
A reasonable response would be

1) Demand the names of the consultants involved and blacklist the firms from any Gov contracts for two years.

2) Insist the executive make reparations, to freeze all dividend payments for a set period or face that nationalisation chat.
One of the benefits of brexit, is we now have "national sovereignty" i.e. there is no EC preventing us (or to hide behind) from doing what needs to be done.

There is no reason for Gov not to get involved in what is clearly a breach of social contract.
Read 5 tweets
14 Jan
The strength of any society is not measured through its wealth, its art, its buildings but by how it treats its poorest and those in need of help.

Greed is measured though the collection of things. Strength is measured though our mutual love and respect for each other.
This is enshrined in the stories we tell every child - "to steal from the rich, to give to the poor" ... it's embedded in our national psyche. It's why we find it so offensive that these companies exploit the poor in a pandemic. There should be no softness from Gov over this.
These companies should just be told that they are a national disgrace in a national emergency caused by the pandemic, they have broken the social contract and Gov is nationalising them with immediate effect with no compensation.
Read 5 tweets
12 Jan
X : Is Serverless the 3rd generation of data centres (cloud being 2nd).
Me : Think of it more like moving up the stack. The car isn't the 3rd generation of the wheel (cart being 2nd) but instead an industrialised concept of a wheel is a component of the car. Image
X : So Serverless has servers!
Me : Yes but it also has power and transistors and copper wire and generators and fibre and nuts and bolts and concrete. The point is not what it contains but what we care about. The level of abstraction.
X : There is an error in that map.
Me : All maps are imperfect. You can improve it. That's the point of a map.
Read 5 tweets
11 Jan
X : Can you apply pace layers to maps?
Me : You can but what is where evolves. However, same rules apply to things, practices, data, knowledge and ethical values. All are forms of evolving capital. In the mapping world, we refer to this with pioneers, settlers and town planners.
X : What's the robot for?
Me : Image from an older presentation slide, don't worry it has no relevance.
X : Is this linked to diffusion?
Me : Not simply. Evolution of a single component can consist of many hundreds of diffusion curves i.e. a virus diffuses but it also evolves.
X : Why have you got DevOps in legacy? We haven't even started yet.
Me : That's not my problem. I would take a look at serverless.
X : DevOps is serverless.
Me : Some of the practices maybe co-opted (see ITIL vs DevOps) but the new faction will decide what it is or isn't.
Read 14 tweets
10 Jan
Whilst I'm delighted by AWS action against Parler - - and support AWS' continuous industrialisation (forcing the market to innovate and preventing rent seeking hence keeping us in the game with China) ... there was a time, long ago, that Gov would do this.
At somepoint, in the not too distant future, our society will need that discussion on the balance of "We" and "Me", to discuss the importance of utilities and learn from China - ibtimes.sg/china-ccp-nati… ... but not now, our Gov structures seem too weak, too lacking of context.
Unfortunately that discussion will be difficult because of the distortions in the system. Sticking within Western Philosophy, even what is "left" and "right" differs between the US and Europe. Even the basic ideas of economics and the role that China plays shows distortion.
Read 12 tweets

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