the station / sector 08
Slack
How to tell where you areAsk what happened to the last three things everyone agreed were worth fixing. If they are still on a list, you are at the bad end. Utilisation is the measurement to distrust here: a team at 100% is not efficient, it is a queue with no absorber, and queueing behaviour will do the rest.
Whether there is room to do the right thing rather than the fast thing.
Slack is last in the numbering and first in the causal order, which is an uncomfortable thing for a site about technical controls to admit: a team with no slack cannot adopt anything on this site. Every control here costs something up front and pays back later, and a team with no room can only take actions that pay back immediately.
This is the most useful page on this site for some readers, and the least actionable, because the lever usually sits above the person reading. If that is you, the honest advice is to stop trying to adopt six things and adopt one, in the sector where you are worst — and to treat the resulting time as the first thing you bought, not a windfall to spend.
Controls that move you along it
- ›Book the time for the boring fix before the week fills
- ›Onboard new contributors deliberately, with people, not just docs
- ›Ask whether the vulnerable code ships before you treat it as urgent
- ›Every flag gets a removal deadline when it is created
- ›Make it safe to say the thing nobody wants to hear
- ›Decide in advance what to drop when you run out of capacity