Cloud Journey — Part 4

Cloud Journey Series:

• Cloud Journey — Part 1. A basic introduction of cloud, applying PACE layering and The 6R’s.
• Cloud Journey — Part 2. A quick review on what is the good organization chart to enable cloud journey.
• Cloud Journey — Part 3. A quick view on Business Values and Business Drivers on a cloud journey.
• Cloud Journey — Part 4. What does cloud mean for your “Talents & Culture”?

People are not Resources. People are your greatest Asset.

Let’s pause for a moment and take a closer look at the abbreviation ‘HR’ — Human Resources. Would we really like to be called resources?

Resource. If you stop and think about it, it’s a terrible way to speak about people. A resource is something you take and use. Applied to people, it carries dismissive and devaluing undertones. “resource” says “you don’t matter to me”. That’s a toxic dynamic for any human endeavor. We should stop using Human Resources as division or job titles.

I’m forthright in my opinion of HR. It’s not that there isn’t important work to be done. There are even some good people. But when the very name “Human Resources” is an oxymoron, there’s got to be a more thoughtful way of designing the part of your organization that is intended to curate your most important asset. People are your greatest asset. You may have gathered I’m a big believer in people, but Jim Collins points out in his perennial classic Good to Great that one of the features of organizations that consistently outperform over the long haul is Disciplined People: “who” before “what”. Using a metaphor of getting the right people on the bus before heading to a destination:

In fact, leaders of companies that go from good to great start not with “where” but with “who.” They start by getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats. And they stick with that discipline — first the people, right seat and then the direction

I have stopped using the term HR and I use “Talents & Culture” as a replacement of that

What does cloud mean for your “Talents & Culture”?

It might not be a technical decision to adopt a cloud why would it even involve or matter to your “Talents & Culture” division. But the deeper issues that underlie why companies choose to adopt and start cloud journey are very relevant to your talent & culture leadership.

SilkRoad survey has identified following five problems for “Talents & Culture” division leaders which is tightly close to your cloud adoption journey:

• Recruiting — Every time a new employee fails, the cost to the employer is more than 150% of the candidate’s salary.
• Retaining Talent — Voluntary turnover is on the rise. A survey by Future Workplace showed that 91% of Millennials expected to stay at a job for fewer than three years.
• Millennials — A survey of more than 37,000 college students showed that narcissistic personality traits rose as fast as obesity rates from the 1980s to the present. That’s a lot of ego for one entry-level employee.
• Succession Planning — According to a SilkRoad survey, only 38 percent of companies are prepared for the sudden retirement of a top executive.
• “Talents & Culture” Business Function — Fifty-three percent of SilkRoad’s survey respondents were most concerned about developing a “Talents & Culture” organization that acts strategically rather than tactically.

All these issues and challenges impact your cloud journey significantly, issues that might rise such as: dealing with interpersonal conflict, dealing with expressed or unexpressed negativity, issues with translating vision into actionable plan. All these issues are rooted in culture of your organization. For a successful cloud journey, organization needs to foster the culture of cooperation for a common goal that translates into empowerment, valuing & enabling failure, keeping high standards, visualizing the work and continuous improvement that delivers actionable results.

What culture enables or disables cloud journey?

An organization culture is the combination of the shared values (not always the one written on wall, sometimes the ones that really practices secretly from top executives), beliefs, past historical decisions, “Talents & Culture” division way of working, ways of performance management and norms. These matters shape the organizational culture. These are some cultural elements make cloud adoption challenging, these are some of the elements.

• Cloud adoption involves DevSecOps, chaos engineering and many other new programming models and paradigms that enables to speed up development and more frequent deployment. This requires a culture of heavy cooperation while keeping autonomy.
• Change in a mindset on how to deliver customer value for business. You can read more about scaling agility and product management. Such mindset shift requires a strong culture of aiming for the best and celebrating failures.
• A culture that avoids blaming vendors and instead sees vendor as an enabler to deliver the organization vision. This roots to many organization culture elements such as how success or project failures are treated in organization and why key members of organization rather blame the vendor instead of taking ownership.
• Willingness to question and challenge very hard the existing status quo and not getting emotional about it. Always a keen passion to improve things and do things better than before.
• Willingness to embrace change. Easy said but hard to make it a culture.
• Organization style and method of decision-making.
• Approach, framework and rail-guards towards taking calculated risks.
• How failure is seen at organization, it is going to impact the performance and bonus and salary raises?
• Cloud journey requires more and more T-Shaped Engineerings which traditional approaches of salary raises, performance reviews, retention bonuses won’t work and in fact might create a culture that is toxic to cloud adoption.
• Ways of working as an organization towards models like tribes, guilds, platform engineering squads and learning & development guilds that enables a culture to cultivates cloud adoption.
• I am not big fan of concepts like “Center of Excellence” or “Center of Competency” for cloud because of toxic impacts of it on cloud purpose (CoEs or CoCs have very basic use cases too that might become useful but hardly). These teams can become a political battleground or a retirement home. Avoid centralizing the power or even decision making in these centers. These “centers” might become tools and vehicles of CTOs/CIOs to influence how things should be built while cloud journey must be business-led and rail-guarded provided by CTOs/CIOs.

Disclaimer

All writing or TechTalk-Chris Shayan are personal blogs/vlogs. Any views or opinions represented in articles or TechTalks are personal and belong solely to the owner or guest of the TechTalk and do not represent those of people, institutions, or organizations that the owner may or may not be associated with in a professional or personal capacity unless explicitly stated. Any views are not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club organization, company or individual.

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