Welcome to the first The Future of CM newsletter of 2023. We continue exploring the next mental model in this series: the Circle of Competence and how this relates to Configuration Management. Especially how the CM Baseline can help us find the needed competencies when assessing a change.
Circle of Competence
The Circle of Competence is a mental model about knowing what you do know, and especially what you do not know. Understanding your Circle of Competence can help you in making better decisions and finding help when you reached the borders of what you know.
I’m no genius. I’m smart in spots—but I stay around those spots.
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Tom Watson Sr., Founder of IBM
When it comes to processing changes and understanding the impact of these changes, we need to right people around the table to assess the impact. We do not need people who say they know stuff, we need people that really know the ins and outs and own it.
Dunning-Kruger Effect
The Dunning-Kruger effect effect occurs when a person’s lack of knowledge and skills in a certain area cause them to overestimate their own competence. By contrast, this effect also causes those who excel in a given area to think the task is simple for everyone, and underestimate their relative abilities as well.
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The Decision Lab
In other words the Dunning-Kruger Effect is the bias that people tend to think they know more than they actually know. Compared to all that can be known, each of us actually knows very little. Impact analysis is not always easy, we tend to overlook potential risks causing expensive corrective actions downstream. So having the right people part of the assessment is key, and we need to know the limits of our knowledge to ensure the right people are being involved. Or at the very least be aware of the risks you take when not involving knowledgeable people before making a decision.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is the bias that people tend to think they know more than they actually know. Compared to all that can be known, each of us actually knows very little. Impact analysis is not always easy, we tend to overlook potential risks causing expensive corrective actions downstream. So having the right people part of the assessment is key, and we need to know the limits of our knowledge to ensure the right people are being involved. Or at the very least be aware of the risks you take when not involving knowledgeable people before making a decision.
The CM Baseline
How can the CM Baseline help? The CM Baseline provides a knowledge graph representing every object and relation that is configuration relevant. It allows you to traverse and explore the configuration information in any direction, as I explained in Connections tell the Story.
Whether you have stored the information in a document or in a model. The creator of the information is typically stored with the dataset. So when you use the CM Baseline, it allows you to find all the relevant impacted objects with their responsible creator who is knowledgeable to help in the assessment. And a downstream creator is often the user the information created by the upstream creator. In CM2 this concept is know as Creator/User.
What happens if these creators leave the company or change function, the best option would be that a change that is triggered via HR, allows you to identify all the datasets owned by that individual and reassign them to a new owner. This should preferably be supported by automation.
In the end personnel changes are also changes that need to be managed similarly to the changes we process on our products. Especially changes to personnel are important to process properly as it enables the organization to respond effectively and efficiently when certain knowledge is required to assess or implement a change.
To read more about Mental Models, please check out the previous posts from the Mental Models series:
- Ethical fading eats Configuration Management Principles for breakfast triggered the creation of the series.
- How to benefit from the compounding effect of changes
- Opportunity cost and the Lollapalooza effect
To read more about the CM Baseline and its components, please check out the previous posts from the CM Baseline series:
- Understanding the Impact of Changes introduced the need for the CM Baseline.
- Connections tell the Story introduced the first component of the CM Baseline, the Business Object Graph.
- Intentions are the desire for new Stories, introduced the second component of the CM Baseline, the Impact Matrix.
- Dependencies limit the possible sequences of events, introduced the third component of the CM Baseline, Dependencies or a.k.a. Change Dependencies.
- Timing is Everything, introduced the fourth and last component of the CM Baseline, Implementation Plans.
- 5 Ways a CM Baseline brings value, explores 5 scenarios that bring value.
- One way to organize information for the CM Baseline, proposes a way to model the knowledge graph of the CM Baseline.
Header Photo by Austin Neill on Unsplash (cropped)