Sustainability

A consultant cuts a number by 30%, presents the slides, and leaves. Three months later, the number is back where it started. I have watched that version many times, and I have been the consultant in it. I have also been the one whose fix was still running long after I was gone. The difference showed up in how the fix got built. The diagnosis: leadership was reading status, not time The team ran the path to production at a large enterprise. As usual, the process involved other specialized teams such as security, infrastructure, and cloud. One application took more than a year to get through it. Nobody inside the pipeline knew that, and everybody was doing their job. ...

The number had just hit zero. For the first time in months, the number of release failures reaching production was zero. Three months of digging had gotten the team there. I could have written up the win that same afternoon and gone home. One month later, it was back up. I have watched this shape play out on enough teams to trust it. A team fixes the real thing, the number falls, everyone breathes out, and then it drifts back. Here is the story of one team that lived exactly that, and the part that finally held. ...