Organisational Patterns

Patterns of hyper-productive software organisations

One of my passions (or vice:-) is software engineering. Software engineering is all about people; the soonest we realise this, the better. Especially all those fools that believe people are like software... interchangeable components of a system!

An area which is of great importance (and interest to me) is that of "Organisational Patterns of Hyper Productive Software Development Organisations".

Seminal work on this area was first conducted by James O. Coplien and the 'Pasteur' team at Bell Labs.

Hyper productive teams tend to share some common organisational patterns, which we can observe, learn from and implement ourselves.

Organisational patterns can be described as organisational structures (or configurations if you prefer) that enable the people within them to be highly productive (as opposed to get in their way like a cathedral like org chart).

Organisational patterns provide a kit (not a religion) of organisational structures that can be employed according to needs of an organisation. These are based on values and principles as opposed to process fads or yet another methodology or maybe dogma.

Organisational improvement

This work, shows a path to organisational improvement, which leads to dramatic increase in productivity and fun for a software producing organisation. I know because I have experienced what happens when you apply them and unfortunately what goes wrong when you break them down (more of the latter actually for my bad luck).

In the past 12 years, this empirical research has documented and analysed what works in software production.

By learning from these documented and empirical studies we can improve our software producing organisations.

Pick up the book or go to the online resources.

Coplien and Harrison have spent more than a decade researching and observing highly productive software organisations, in order to capture and document the patterns that made them so productive.

Finally all this knowledge has been captured please make use of it!