gtmjosh | Update Owners, Documentation, and Training

Update Owners, Documentation, and Training

The change reaches the people and documents that have to move with it.

A change that updates the system and not the owner, the documentation, and the training has created tomorrow's drift. Chapter 5 exists because this chapter got skipped somewhere.

Four things move with a change. The owner, if it changed, because a metric or rule that now belongs to somebody else with nobody told is a thing that will not be maintained. The documentation, which is what Chapter 5's drift check compares against. The training, meaning whatever people were taught about how this works. And the audience of the reports, if a definition moved, because somebody has a number in a slide from last quarter that no longer means what it meant.

The second-order cost

Leaving documentation stale is worse than it first looks. The drift check from Chapter 5 compares the document against live behavior, so a deliberate change with a stale document gets reported as a defect. The drift report is now wrong, people learn to ignore it, and you have lost the mechanism that catches the real drift.

Name who confirms

The propagation rule needs a person who confirms it happened, and it should not be the person who made the change, for the same reason a stalled owner should not be their own escalation: they are the least likely to notice what they forgot.

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Move everything that has to move

The change above was correct and shipped, and it has now broken the report that was supposed to catch problems. Write the rule that prevents it.

Fixture: stale-documentation

When the drift report becomes the problem

FIXTURE-STALE-DOCS

Change made: Deliberate, correct, shipped
Documentation updated: No
What the drift check now reports: The deliberate change, as a defect
What people learn: To ignore the drift report
Compared with the original gap: Worse

What moves with a change?

The owner if it changed, the documentation, the training, and the report audience if a definition moved.
Four things. The report audience is the one people forget, and somebody is holding a number from last quarter that no longer means what it meant.The documentation, so the drift check keeps working.
Directly fixes the failure in the situation above, which is the immediate problem.An announcement to everyone affected.
Fast, reaches everybody at once, and requires no document maintenance.

Who confirms the propagation happened?

The operations owner, who did not make the change.
Somebody other than the author, for the same reason the stall alert does not go to the stalled owner.The person who made the change, since they know what it touched.
They have the most complete picture of what the change affected.Nobody specific. A checklist on the change record covers it.
Removes a bottleneck and keeps the record of what was done in one place.

Chapter 8 of 90 complete