Organisation Refactoring and Culture Hacking : Lessons from Software by Andrew Harmel Law

Marc Andreessen famously said “software is eating the world”; yet most of our teams and organisations simply aren’t set up for us to take part in this revolution. Why? Our organisational surroundings are directly responsible for inefficient design and delivery – locally-optimised silos, opaque/ossified power structures, multi-layered middle management, command-and-control execs – the failings are well known. For us makers this is incredibly frustrating, when all we want to do is ship great product. In this session I'm going to show how your software engineering skills make you ideally suited to fix these org and cultural problems. How do I know? Because I've done it myself, and want to tell you what I learned. I'll show you tried and tested ways to identify and fix these problems - fast-moving culture hacks, and safe org-refactorings - so you can drive effective incremental change from the bottom up; change that responds to the specifics of your organisation and focusses on efficient delivery of software; change that take its inspiration from the software techniques which we know so well. Andrew Harmel Law: A highly enthusiastic, self-starting and responsible Tech Principal; Andrew specialises in Java / JVM technologies, agile delivery, build tools and automation, and domain driven design. Experienced across the software development lifecycle and in many sectors including government, banking, and eCommerce, what motivates him is the production of large-scale software solutions, fulfilling complex client requirements. He understands that people, tooling, architecture and process all have key roles to play in achieving this. Andrew has a passion for open source software and its communities. He has been interested in and involved with OSS to a greater or lesser extent since his career began; as a user, contributor, expert group member, or paid advocate. Finally, Andrew enjoys sharing his experience as much as possible. This sharing is not only seen in his formal consulting engagements, but also informally through mentoring, blog posts, conferences (speaking and organising), and open sourcing his code.