In my early career, delivering software products involved processes that blamed “human error” for a great many production problems. After all, the deployment steps were meticulously documented, line by line, command by command, in a giant color-coded Excel spreadsheet. All someone had to do was to follow the instructions to the letter. Well, that and apply intelligent human creativity whenever the computers didn’t behave quite the way the documentation said they would.
I can remember sitting in numerous after action reviews in which the remedy for a failed deployment was to remind a sysadmin to pay more attention to the details of a documented process or to the messages returned by the system being upgraded.
Fortunately, our industry has evolved significantly since then. Automated deployments and continuous integration are widespread practices when it comes to delivering software. But routine upgrade practices aren’t the only place where human error is blamed for systemic weaknesses.
You may have a heroism culture that creates burnout, arrogant experts who silence dissent, frequent alerts with misleading urgency, or technical debt or inadequate tools or siloed information.
Any of these situations can create conditions that invite failures. But when you call them human error, consider inspecting the human leaders (possibly yourself included) who tolerate the systems that make those failures likely.
And if you’d like a thinking partner to explore your conditions and systems and look for creative ways to minimize human error, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.
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