Mark Olson was right about big ops

[totient]

As many people who have ever stood still for five minutes within my earshot know, I believe that organizations pass through phase transitions as they grow, with the major inflection points being at 10, 50, 250, 1250, and I speculate 2x5^n for any integer n. The two major ways that I model this are organizational fanout, wherein the maximum number of reports is 10 and the best achievable indirect reporting efficiency is 50%; and communications modes, which relate to Dunbar's number and the limits of human comprehension. Communications mode shifts each have a different description and there is enough material that I will probably eventually write a book about them, so I won't describe them here.

A consequence of this, as again many of my readers will have heard me say already, is that as organizations approach one of these inflection points from below, they begin to adapt to keep their communications and control structures working. They optimize for output from individual contributors at the expense of encouraging teamwork and delegation to keep their headcount from rising. They put infrastructure in place to smooth the existing, but fraying, means of communication. There are countless such knobs and I'm sure my book will include descriptions of many of them.

But for the organization to successfully pass through a transition point, all of these knobs, having been turned all the way up, will have to be turned all the way in the other direction. The organization suddenly needs entirely new communications infrastructure. Organizational cohesion will have to be replaced by unit cohesion. Delegation and teamwork suddenly takes priority over individual output. Schedules and timelines will suddenly be driven from different points as communications modes shift¹. And so on.

Note, importantly, that it is not enough to recognize an optimization as being specific to the lower approach to the phase transition. To turn the knobs the other way, you have to know what the other way is. You can't just rip the knob off.

Big Ops is a knob. We use it in volunteer organizations of 249 people to keep the singly-indirected, centralized communications flowing. When the organization reaches 251 people it begins to drop information -- sometimes critical information.

Boskone recognized this as a problem and tried to solve it by ripping the knob off, with predictable results. Arisia seems to have found the other end of the knob, because the Ops desk at Arisia 2013 was positively boring. Information was flowing around it, and getting where it needed to go. We threw so many replacement options at the problem that it is hard to say which one is the other end of the knob, but I think one thing that really helped was having so many people still reading their email at con, so that information could reach, for instance, hotel liaisons directly from the departments that needed to reach them, without Ops having to get involved.

We do still need an Ops desk. They will still need to be prepared to deal with the kinds of big-Ops activities that used to happen there. But if this year is indicative, Big Ops is withering away.

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1. more on this in another post, because it is a brand new discovery for me.

Comments

[rmd]

can you really compare Boskone's big ops approach with anything in the era of 'internet in your pants'? just because it radically changes the speed of information flow and the possible ways for information to flow.

Also, I personally think communication in a group starts dropping off below 10 - maybe around 6 or 8 people. but that may just be me rather than a universal.

[totient]

The big Boskones, except for the very last one, had radios -- and Arisia had them too, even this year. Often there were (and are) multiple channels requiring someone in Ops to relay. And despite the internet in everyone's pants, there had been until very very recently an assumption that email was not a good way to reach people at runtime, and that the thing to do was go into Ops and see if anyone there could find them. That Ops has recently been doing so by cell phone instead of by radio isn't what changed things. The new thing was that people -- finally! -- realized that they didn't need to throw away their existing communications modes and replace them all with putting Ops in the middle.

Boskone could have replaced Big Ops with the Voodoo Message Board and given staff instructions to check it every hour. That our Voodoo Message Board is electronic and in our pants is not the innovation.

[rmd]

Cool. Yay organizational optimization!

Huh?

[http://www.w3.org/People/Sandro/]

This post looks interesting and highly relevant to a lot that I do [both in helping keep W3C running and in vaguely trying to keep the Web running], but I can't figure out who Mark Olson is or what Big Ops is. For that matter, I've never been able to figure out what Ops does at Arisia.

(I do understand, I think, what Ops and DevOps are in an Internet company -- just as a point of reference.)

*shrug*

Mostly just FYI, in case you didn't realize who might be included/excluded by your word choice.

Re: Huh?

[totient]

Mark Olson has an interesting perspective on Big Ops.

Re: Huh?

[randomness]

Now I understand what you mean when you said "ripping the knob off".

This phrase also jumps out at me:
"I think we completely misunderstood the problem."

Re: Huh?

[roozle]

The last post totient wrote had a link to Mark Olson's essay on Boskone's encounter with rapid growth, http://www.nesfa.org/History/RiseAndFall.html

What Ops does at Arisia shifts a little bit from year to year. But for the last several years the notion has been that if you're a staffer with a need or a question, you came to ops. I agree that things were more decentralized this year, and it's an interesting analysis.

In general (with some exceptions of course) things were calmer this year, so that may have just been a case of boring = good when it comes to con operations.

email not for everyone

[paradoox]

Not everyone has access to email at cons. I believe the main hotel liaison said "don't assume that". Logistics said "don't assume that". We are already marginalizing some people who don't deal well with email. Let's not make it worse.

I do think there were some interesting trends this year. Use of cell phones rather than radios for Div Heads.

However, I think communication this year was very disjointed and disappointing. Many people didn't get the memo on the sign policy and staff still used things other than blue tape and put things in elevators. Late checkout was a hairball. The pre-con "newsletters" were often a day late with incomplete information.

I.E. I really don't think this year was any better than past years - it was just "different".

IMO, we need to do a better job of subscribing staff (or at least Area Heads to Staff-Announce or a new Area-Heads mailing list and sending information there. I also don't mean sending meeting minutes there. I mean one item at a time. When some people get a two page message summarizing a meeting, they just don't read it. The sign policy should have been sent to staff-announce. A reminder about only blue tape should have been sent to staff-announce. Information about late checkout should have been sent to staff-announce. As separate messages. And lack of information about Massage Den was a total mess. After I found out about it 24 hours late, I had to leave a meeting and make about 6 phone calls to inform my direct staff. I could go on.

-$.02

Re: email not for everyone

[omly]

The other interesting trend to me as I am seeing it in my day job too is the importance of texting to communications, even more than phone calls or email.

Re: Big Ops

[cos]

Do you know any of the people who run Falcon Ridge Folk Festival? Over the time I've been going they've grown from ~5K to ~15K over three years, then shifted up and down between as low as around 12K to as high as around 20K (unofficially) over the years. I'd be curious to hear a discussion of this between you and them...

Re: Big Ops

[totient]

The real question isn't how many people attend, it's how many people are on staff. Arisia has often come out around 10% of attendees volunteering, but the actual need is mostly not linear and we have let other constraints vary our volunteer headcount above or below that number. The folk festivals I've been to didn't seem to have too many places where the volunteer labor needed depended directly on the number of people who came through the doors.

Changes in size affect Arisia more indirectly, through changes in budget, which allow us to do fancier things. For Arisia these things often cost volunteer time as well, and the real reason we want to grow our organization is so that we will be able to do all of the awesome things we can now afford. Does FRFF also add more things as they find they can afford them? Or do they do a similar number of more expensive things, in the form of getting in more expensive acts than they could have afforded before? Spending more money per timeslot wouldn't have a lot of staffing impact.

Re: Big Ops

[cos]

I don't know. I can guess, but really, this is exactly the kind of stuff I wish I could hear discussed by people who do know.