Ways Of Working (WOW)

Note

Work in Progress

Status: first sketch, work in progress, request for collaboration

Date: 2025-03-21

Governance: To Be Discovered; potentially a combo of this repo partipants, DHCW CISO, NHS Wales UCB peers, etc.

Situation - Context and Problem Statement

• We want to encourage high-trust high-speed participation in our org and our repos, and help shape what good participation can look like, rather than just a blank slate.

• Broadly this is known as our "ways of working", and some people and companies may also know this as a mix of principles, values, whys, tenets, ground rules, aspirations, norms, working agreements, culture, etc.

Background - Decision Drivers

• We want to get good-enough quality work in place now, so we can try it out, ask for feedback, get help with it with Capacitas consultants who have two more weeks with us, etc.

• We want to align with industry standards (not reinvent the wheel).

Assessment - Considered Options

For immediate ship, we want to align with what we know works well broadly (which Joel has) and what works well for NHS (which NHS England has):

• Ways of Working – Joel's many-year multi-client aggregation.

• NHS England GitHub ways of working

To expand this ADR during the work-in-progress, here are a bunch of additional options, and we could/should add more as we discover them:

• Team Norms, Working Agreements, and Simple Rules by Esther Derby

• Working Agreements by Jane Haskell

• Adult Principles by John Perry Barlow

• Principles by Nabeel S. Qureshi

• Ground rules at Tesla by Elon Musk

• Ground Rules by Tree Bressen

• Ground rules for effective meetings by Get The Picture

• High-velocity decision making by Amazon

• How to send progress updates by Slava Akhmechet

• How we structure our work and teams at Basecamp

• Leadership Principles by United States Marine Corps

• Project management practices by Hacker News participants

• Rules of the Road by Jerry Perenchio

• Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)

• Software Engineering at Google

• Software working advice by Cyranix

• Team working agreements example by giffconstable

• The Core Protocols by McCarthy

• The Five Keys to a Successful Google Team

• The unwritten laws of engineering at Stedi

• Engineering management checklist by Patrick Newman

• Strategies to improve workplace communication - By Calm Business

• Onboarding and induction checklist - By employmenthero

• Our Values - What it Means to Work at ZOE

• 101 Additional Advices by Kevin Kelly

Recommendation - Decision Outcome

Adopt a ways-of-working repository, taking elements of the NHS England existing work, Joel's existing work, and any feedback as we go.

• We start now, and iterate as we learn-- this is likely to be especially true for small tuning thanks to CISO participation for the emergency department authentication project ASAP.

• We understand that NHS England is significantly ahead of NHS Wales with this kind of work, so we have catch up to do, and some of the wording may need simplification or more explanation.

• We anticipate that no one will actually care much about this for a while, because it's just docs and checklists; the goal is to get a few points on the scoreboard, not boil the oceans.