THE WORKING ARCHIVE.
Essays on the technical, organisational, and cultural systems that make software delivery work worse—and the evidence needed to change them.
Delivery health
When delivery starts to fail, inspect the system.
Evidence about engineering management, delivery risk, and the conditions that make capable teams brittle.
16 JAN 2026
Case Study: Engineering Management in Action
A case study in diagnosing an engineering team in crisis, finding the systemic causes of delivery failure, and designing a practical intervention plan.
16 JAN 2026
An Engineering Management Manifesto
I don’t manage engineers to control output. I manage systems so that people can do work that matters, with autonomy, honesty, and care.
Agile without theatre
Keep feedback loops; challenge the bureaucracy around them.
Essays on culture, tools, incentives, and why process can become a substitute for learning.
04 SEPT 2025
Culture, is not your friend
Agile coaching is cultural change work—a systems view of how organisational culture resists, adapts, and can be cultivated instead of imposed.
09 SEPT 2025
Jir’Ah, the Paperwork Deity: Why Jira Is a Shitty Agile Tool
Jira is not a neutral tool—its workflows, fields, and permissions shape team behaviour, reinforce bureaucracy, and can quietly bury agility.
27 AUG 2025
Vimes vs The Machine: What Terry Pratchett Can Teach Us About Agile Cultural Transformation
What Terry Pratchett’s Sam Vimes reveals about Agile cultural transformation, power, bureaucracy, resistance, and the limits of process theatre.
Technical literacy
See technical risk without pretending to be the implementer.
Practical lenses for delivery leaders who need to read the signals around software work.
24 OCT 2025
Why Every Scrum Master Should Know How Code Works
Most project failures aren’t technical — they’re process failures. And the one person who could have stopped them didn’t know how to read code.
27 AUG 2025
The Cook and the Coder
Lessons from working as a line cook—mise en place, clean work, calm under pressure, teamwork, and testing—applied to building software.
Chronological continuation
Further essays.
The lenses above are selected routes through the archive. These are the remaining essays, ordered from newest to oldest.
11 JUL 2026
AI Is an Outside Context Problem
AI is an Outside Context Problem for the modern corporation. Culture and organisational structure, not technology, will decide who survives it.
02 MAY 2026
The Car Makes Us Bad Systems Thinkers
Traffic flow as a metaphor for systems thinking, fairness, queues, local optimization and organizational behavior.
16 JAN 2026
A Product Management Manifesto
Product management is decision-making under uncertainty—reducing risk, learning quickly, and solving real problems instead of shipping features on faith.
14 OCT 2025
DevOps Is the Real Scaling Framework
DevOps—not SAFe or LeSS—is the true path to scalable agility. Learn how architecture, automation, and team design solved the scaling problem.
25 AUG 2025
he's back
A brief, Bill Hicks-inspired hello world marking the return of Carlo Kruger’s personal journal.