Study: 68 percent of IT projects fail. Not just the government's playbook. The U.S. Digital Services Playbook.
Talking-Tough. How to master the art of self-marketing. Teamwork. Atul Gawande: How Do Good Ideas Spread? Why do some innovations spread so swiftly and others so slowly? Consider the very different trajectories of surgical anesthesia and antiseptics, both of which were discovered in the nineteenth century. The first public demonstration of anesthesia was in 1846. The Boston surgeon Henry Jacob Bigelow was approached by a local dentist named William Morton, who insisted that he had found a gas that could render patients insensible to the pain of surgery. That was a dramatic claim. In those days, even a minor tooth extraction was excruciating. Without effective pain control, surgeons learned to work with slashing speed.
On October 16, 1846, at Massachusetts General Hospital, Morton administered his gas through an inhaler in the mouth of a young man undergoing the excision of a tumor in his jaw. Four weeks later, on November 18th, Bigelow published his report on the discovery of “insensibility produced by inhalation” in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. Far from it. Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture. Posted by jallspaw | Filed under engineering, people Last week, Owen Thomas wrote a flattering article over at Business Insider on how we handle errors and mistakes at Etsy. I thought I might give some detail on how that actually happens, and why. Anyone who’s worked with technology at any scale is familiar with failure. Failure cares not about the architecture designs you slave over, the code you write and review, or the alerts and metrics you meticulously pore through. So: failure happens. Maybe they should be fired. This is the traditional view of “human error”, which focuses on the characteristics of the individuals involved.
We don’t take this traditional view at Etsy. A Blameless Post-Mortem What does it mean to have a ‘blameless’ Post-Mortem? Well, maybe. Having a Just Culture means that you’re making effort to balance safety and accountability. Having a “blameless” Post-Mortem process means that engineers whose actions have contributed to an accident can give a detailed account of: