This post is part 2 of a 4 part-series. You can start over or read the introduction in this post.

Here are all the posts in this series.

  1. Software Delivery Performance
  2. Organizational Culture (this post)
  3. Continuous Delivery
  4. Lean Management

Part 2 - Organizational Culture

In the previous post, I talked about software delivery performance that has an impact to the organizational goal. In this post, I will talk about Organizational Culture and its impacts on organizational goals and also software delivery performance.

Figure 1 - Organizational Culture and its impacts

As you can see, organizational culture can impact both software delivery performance and organizational performance. This is a kind of two birds with one stone. Next, you will learn what defines organizational culture and how we can improve it to move toward our end goals.

What is Organizational Culture (in the context of this book)

To make the culture measurable, they use the Westrum model to categorize organizational culture. There are 3 types of culture in this model.

  • Pathological (Power-Oriented) characterized by low cooperation, nontransparent and blaming
  • Bureaucratic (Rule-Oriented) characterized by some cooperation, silo, and rules
  • Generative (Performance-Oriented) characterized by high cooperation, transparency, and innovation

What Organizational Culture predict

What they found is that culture can predict both Software Delivery Performance and Organizational Performance. Generative culture helps information flow throughout organizations and makes it easier to deal with change. Blaming culture is also part of low performer organizations because they take time to find a person to blame instead of finding a creative solution for the long run.

How to change Organizational Culture

Now we realize that culture is matters. The question is how we can change it. Their research shows that Lean and Agile practices can drive culture change, Continuous Delivery, and Lean Management in particular (as depicted in Figure 1). This finding gives us a way to improve organizational culture which has never has been obvious. I will explain more about these two practices in the next posts.

Conclusion

In this post, we learn that culture is important and measurable. It can predict software delivery and organization performance. More importantly, we can improve it using Continuous Delivery and Lean Management practices which we will learn more about in the next post.