Library
The work we actually rely on
We do not publish thought leadership. This is a reading list: the books, papers and articles that shape how we run programmes, summarised and linked to the original. None of it is ours.
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Operating model4 min read
Your architecture will look like your org chart whether you like it or not
Conway wrote this down in 1968. Sixty years on, most target architectures are still drawn without anyone checking who will be allowed to talk to whom.
Source: Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent?, Datamation, 1968
Programme risk6 min read
0.5%. That is how many big projects land on budget, on time and on benefits.
Flyvbjerg has the largest dataset on big projects anyone has assembled. The headline number should change how you plan, and usually does not.
Source: Bent Flyvbjerg & Dan Gardner, How Big Things Get Done, Currency / Penguin Random House, 2023
The full library
Legacy modernization4 min read
The alternative to a big-bang rewrite has had a name for twenty years
Fowler named the pattern after a plant that grows around its host and replaces it in place. Most failed replatforming programmes are ones that ignored it.
Source: Martin Fowler, Strangler Fig Application, martinfowler.com, 2004, rewritten 2024
Delivery performance5 min read
Four measures that survived 23,000 responses
Speed and stability are not a trade-off. That finding is the most useful thing anyone has said about software delivery in twenty years.
Source: Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble & Gene Kim, Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps, IT Revolution, 2018
Operating model5 min read
Conway's Law, turned into something you can actually staff
Four team types and three ways they are allowed to interact. The constraint it optimises for is cognitive load, which is the one nobody budgets for.
Source: Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow, IT Revolution, 2019
Data & AI5 min read
The model is the small box in the middle
A decade before the current AI cycle, Google's engineers documented exactly why ML systems are cheap to prototype and expensive to keep alive.
Source: D. Sculley et al. (Google), Hidden Technical Debt in Machine Learning Systems, NeurIPS (Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 28), 2015
Operations4 min read
Four pages that should be read before every post-incident review
Cook was writing about medicine. Anyone who has run a production system will recognise all eighteen points immediately.
Source: Richard I. Cook, MD, How Complex Systems Fail, Cognitive Technologies Laboratory, University of Chicago, 1998
Design4 min read
Thirty years old, and still the fastest review you can run
Nielsen refined these from a factor analysis of 249 real usability problems. They still catch most of what goes wrong before anyone books a research session.
Source: Jakob Nielsen, 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design, Nielsen Norman Group, 1994, updated 2020
Every entry in this library is a third-party work, credited to its author and publisher and linked to the original. Summaries are our reading of the source, not the author's words, and quotation is limited to wording verified against the primary text.
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