Room to Move

In his book, Slack, Tom DeMarco writes:

Slack is a prescription for building a capacity to change into the modern enterprise. It looks into the heart of the efficiency-flexibility quandary: The more efficient you get, the harder it is to change. The book shows managers how to make their organizations slightly less efficient but enormously more effective. It coaches them on the introduction of slack, the missing ingredient required for all change. It counsels a thoughtful use of slack instead of the mindless obsession with elimination of all slack in the interests of efficiency.

The other day on the job one of the devs on my team posted a PR for code review with a comment like: “This removes X from the codebase. It's not terribly important, but it's been bugging for a long time and I'm glad to be rid of it.”

I realized that the presence of such PRs is an interesting metric to measure the amount of Slack of my team.

If they're too efficient in knocking out cards from stakeholders, I probably won't see any work like this.

repost from my cLabs blog