Thread by @allspaw

An excellent overview of @LauraMDMaguire's dissertation ("Controlling the Costs of Coordination in Large-scale Distributed Software Systems") is on the Resilience Engineering Association's site.

Will give the url after some fascinating bits regarding the results...

(1)Incident Commanders needing to recruit other folks to help with a response underway have to make multiple efforts.

They have to:
- Monitor the current capacity (of the response) relative to changing demands and identifying additional resource requirements

- Identify the skills and experienced required
- Identify who is available
- Determine how to contact them
- Contact them and alert them to the event
- Wait for a response

- Adapt the current work to accommodate this new engagement (waiting, slowing down or speeding up, completing other tasks to aid coordination)

- Prepare for the new folks coming to the scene by a) anticipating what they'll need, b) developing a situation assessment or status update, c) giving access/permissions to tools & coordination channels, d) generating shared artifacts (dashboards, screenshots)

and also e)dealing with any access issues (inability to join web conference or trouble establishing audio bridge)

A 2nd bit from Laura's research was to identify how all participants in smooth coordinative activity incur coordination costs – it cannot be proceduralized away or assigned to a single role.

There can be significant effort expended by the new folks joining the response, in terms of:
- Being interrupted in their work
- Assessing the request relative to their capabilities
- Assessing the request relative to their capacity to act

- Deferring or abandoning their own work
- Acknowledging their orientation to the problem
- Communicating about the deferral or abandonment to the parties they coordinate with
- Gaining access to collaboration tools

- Assessing available information
- Clarifying (available data and expectations)
- Requesting additional information
- Forming questions about the state of the event or system
- Determining interruptability of the participants already in the event

- Forming interjections
- Interjecting
- Determining roles or role reallocation within the existing group
- Assessing work underway
- Assessing implications of work underway
- Considering their contributions relative to problem constraints

and
- Assessing how their contributions may influence work underway

(these activities can happen quite fluidly, but for sure: there's typically a lot going on here that we rarely acknowledge!)

These costs are often incurred at points in time when they are least ‘affordable’ – during high tempo, highly demanding cognitive efforts – which can lead to degradations in the joint activities and coordination breakdowns."

Bananas, right? More from the high-level article, here! resilience-engineering-association.org/blog/2021/01/1…

#ResilienceEngineering

Oh, and here is her actual dissertation: bit.ly/MaguirePhD