<story><title>How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum</title><url>https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/project-management-at-big-tech/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>carlisle_</author><text>Great insight, my key takeaway is this:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The fewer people you need to make decisions, the faster you can make them.&lt;p&gt;This is the only way I’ve seen a “rockstar” or “10x” get stuff done as fast as they do. They only have to talk to a couple of people at most to start making big changes. The more large and stable a company gets, the more they seem to want to spread decision making power around the org. This appears to be very counterproductive, and it’s nice to see the simple truth called out.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nickjj</author><text>This is really it.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a world of a difference in what you can do if you have free reign to make most technical decisions with full autonomy (self guided R&amp;amp;D, picking stuff, spiking it out, doing it for real, etc.), perhaps only reporting back weekly outcomes to a CTO and also asking their advice as needed to align on big picture goals while nothing is ever blocked.&lt;p&gt;vs.&lt;p&gt;Most decisions needs to go through someone else, which then turns into an adhoc request for another department which then has to ticket it out and implement things on their schedule. They could be a great team and do everything in the best way you can realistically hope for but before you know it, things that were literally 1 or 2 hours of dev time end up taking 3-4 weeks simply because they have other things going on too. You keep repeating this pattern and it&amp;#x27;s how something ends up taking 6 months instead of 2 weeks. It&amp;#x27;s also one of the most frustrating things to be blocked. It forces you to context switch between many things to keep yourself busy. You spend all of your time reacting to eventually getting unblocked in an uncontrolled way instead of just sitting down and cranking it out. That means you might have to jump back into something you worked on 2 weeks ago and re-get all of that context back in your head.&lt;p&gt;I know in an Agile sense every team should be self sustained and can own their work from beginning to end but from an infrastructure perspective you may run into scenarios where you need resources created by another team because in a bigger org it&amp;#x27;s company policy. The blockers could be a combo of waiting on that other team or waiting until multiple people sign off on moving forward with XYZ tech.</text></comment>
<story><title>How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum</title><url>https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/project-management-at-big-tech/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>carlisle_</author><text>Great insight, my key takeaway is this:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The fewer people you need to make decisions, the faster you can make them.&lt;p&gt;This is the only way I’ve seen a “rockstar” or “10x” get stuff done as fast as they do. They only have to talk to a couple of people at most to start making big changes. The more large and stable a company gets, the more they seem to want to spread decision making power around the org. This appears to be very counterproductive, and it’s nice to see the simple truth called out.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>altacc</author><text>One of the reasons enterprise organisations are so slow to adapt and release new products is the number of people needed to make a decision. I&amp;#x27;ve seen large companies try to implement agile and it generally fails because they can&amp;#x27;t shift to quick &amp;amp; effective decision making processes. Greenfield projects that get developed quickly due to independence and have great promise for the future get the hug of death as soon as management decides to bring the project into the same decision making as the rest of the org.</text></comment>