Over three years we took our release cadence from quarterly to weekly, and by every measure my department reports, that was a success. Smaller changes, fewer failures, faster fixes, a rollback that is genuinely routine. I presented the figures with some pride.
Then the head of operations asked us, in front of other people, to slow down, and my first reaction was to hear it as resistance to change. It was not. It was a capacity statement about her department, and she had the numbers I did not.
Each release with any visible effect produced a burst of contacts to the service desk: on average forty-one calls from branch staff, concentrated on the two days after. Her team of fourteen hundred people includes a large number who use our systems for one narrow task, occasionally, and who had learned that task by being shown it once. The training team was rewriting the same three process documents every few weeks and had stopped being able to keep the published version accurate. Two of her supervisors had started keeping their own crib sheets, which were wrong within a fortnight.
We had optimised our own throughput and pushed the constraint downstream, into a part of the organisation that has no pipeline, no automation and no slack, and then measured only our half.
The change was not to slow the pipeline down. Technical changes still go out continuously, because the cost of holding them is real. What we separated was deployment from exposure. Anything that alters what a person sees or does is held behind a flag and released on a published monthly date, batched, with one set of notes written for the people who do the work rather than for us. The training team gets the batch two weeks ahead. The service desk gets the same notes on the same day, which they previously did not.
Support contacts per release are down by roughly two thirds, and the flow of work through my department has not changed at all.
Automation raises how fast we can produce change. It does nothing for how fast anybody can absorb it, and that second number now sets the pace of everything we do.
– Serguey Shinder
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