Samantha Schaevitz at StaffPlus London 2023
summary
Standardization promises lower maintenance and faster onboarding but creates long risky migrations that sap ownership and stifle innovation unless managed. Migrations require automation, reporting, clear ownership boundaries, rollback capability and a playbook, with a central team doing most of the work—an explicit 80/20 rule for committed engineering time—and client teams limited to the remainder. Expect unknown unknowns, partial-migration slogs and multi-year timelines—one recent project spans eight years from prototype to perceived payoff.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (15)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:02Standardization efforts fail
- 3:34Cost of non-standard systems
- 5:00Industrializing production systems
- 7:06Standardization risks
- 9:11Standardization migration phases
- 10:35Team ownership and innovation
- 12:59When standardization works
- 14:45Standards and business goals
- 16:11Balancing standardization
- 17:15Leading standardization efforts
- 18:39Ownership and politics
- 20:04Decision-making for standards
- 21:48Completeness of standardization
- 23:54Is standardization worth it
related talks
11mOptimizing Product Management with Multi-Tenancy Architecture
46mMaster Software Architecture: From Simplicity to Complexity
23mA little less testing, a little more quality
47mKeeping up to date in a bespoke software development world
32mSplitting the monolith
07mMonolith to over 60 Services
45mSoftware delivery with skills-based, self organising teams
14mGrowing pains: Scaling and re-architecting systems under fire