Over the summer, I worked as an intern at Amazon.com, under the Subscriptions group. Our team handled all the charging and organization of digital subscriptions associated with other Amazon services (namely Kindle and Prime). I'm not analyzing this group as a cognitive system because of all the specific tasks that each person on the team had to do - there were seven of us, six software engineers and one manager - but instead, the way our group worked together to organize ourselves and truly work towards the same overarching goal: being the most functionally efficient and useful to our customers.
The way we functioned as a cognitive system lies squarely in the agile development methodology that our team used. Every other week on Monday, we do in depth planning on what each person is going to try to accomplish in the following two weeks. Goals are literally represented by sticky notes on a white board with our estimation for how long that task will take. Assuming that person was going to be there every day for those two weeks, if anyone had more than 40 to 50 hours of work, we would have to redistribute or remove goals. By doing this for everyone, we would have a good representation of what each person was doing for the next two weeks, and also how each task would fit into our overall goals.
On top of this, we would have daily “scrums” where we meet for ten minutes to go over briefly what everyone did the day before and the goals for that day. Any discussion was saved for “post-scrum” and any adjustments (or transformations) could be made on the tasks for that period. Therefore requirement changing can happen very often and is encouraged if necessary. We do this by going to our white board and sticky notes and changing those by removing it, moving it, or redefining something on it.
This specific task of goal making and agile development is very tightly coupled. We all have to present to plan and it usually takes at least half of the day to plan. We all meet in a meeting room and discuss and no one is afraid to throw out ideas and discuss. This makes the rest of the two week period much more loosely coupled, as we all work on our goals and only meet if necessary (other than scrums).
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After reading some posts, it seems like the tasks that involve a specific task to get down, like the scrums process or any projects/ anything that will have be handed into a higher authority will be tightly coupled. This probably is because there is some sort of payoff to the task at hand. Because of this payoff, it seems like your group was very highly organized and structured. Even so, there were still periods of time where the group shifted from tightly coupled to loosely coupled.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that the internal representations are prior knowledge of how long a certain task should take to complete, while the external representations are the sticky notes and white board used to assign the tasks to individual members of the cognitive system. By having daily scrums, you were able to transform these representations to achieve the ultimate goal of being as functionally efficient as possible. Since planning out ideas and tasks in person is so important to accomplishing your goals, it makes sense that this cognitive system is very tightly coupled. Nice post!
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