The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Maze of Enterprise IT

In many of the more relaxed civilisations on the outer Eastern spiral arm of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large, friendly letters on its cover.

This guide has neither of those advantages. It is not cheap — nothing in Enterprise IT is cheap, including the guide to Enterprise IT, which requires a procurement process, a vendor evaluation, a security audit, and a three-month contract negotiation before it can be read. And it does not say DON’T PANIC on the cover, because panic is the correct response to Enterprise IT, and any guide that tells you otherwise is either lying or has not been to a Big Room Planning session.

What this guide does have is a map. The map is of a maze. The maze is Enterprise IT. The maze has no exit. But it does have departments, and the departments have meetings, and the meetings have agendas, and the agendas have items, and the items have owners, and the owners have other meetings, and if you follow the trail long enough you will arrive back where you started, which is either a bug or the Retrospective, depending on whether you have a Scrum Master.

“The maze has no exit. This is not a defect. Mazes with exits are called corridors, and corridors do not require consultants.”
— The Lizard, who has never entered a maze

Section I: The Condition

Before you enter the maze, you must understand what the maze is made of. The walls are not stone. The walls are process.

Section II: The Process

The maze is not random. It has structure. The structure is called “process,” and it was designed by people who believe that if you cannot measure it, it does not exist, and if you can measure it, you should measure it in a meeting.

Section III: The People

The maze is operated by people. The people have titles. The titles have meanings. The meanings have changed. The people remain.

Section IV: The Laws

The maze has laws. Not rules — rules can be broken. Laws. The kind that operate whether you acknowledge them or not, like gravity, except gravity is simpler and better documented.

Section V: The Conditions

The maze does things to the people inside it. These are the conditions. They are not bugs. They are features of the maze.

Section VI: The Books

The maze has a library. The library contains books that describe the maze. Some describe it accurately. Some describe what the maze should be. The gap between the two is where consultants live.

Section VII: The Transformation

Every maze has a transformation. The transformation is the project to change the maze. The transformation does not change the maze. The transformation adds a new wing to the maze labeled “TRANSFORMATION.”

How to Escape the Maze

You cannot escape the maze. The maze has no exit. This was established in paragraph three and has not changed.

However, you can become comfortable in the maze. You can learn which corridors lead to dead ends (Big Room Planning) and which lead to corridors that lead to dead ends (SAFe). You can learn which meetings can be skipped (most of them) and which cannot (Daily Standup — absence is noticed, participation is not). You can learn that the deploy button at the center of the maze is real, and it works, and nobody is guarding it, and the reason nobody presses it is that pressing it requires a Change Advisory Board approval that requires a JIRA ticket that requires a Product Owner sign-off that requires a stakeholder meeting that requires a calendar slot that does not exist because the calendar is full of ceremonies.

Or you can do what riclib did: leave the maze, build a markdown indexer in Go, and write a satirical encyclopedia about the maze from outside. The pay is worse. The meetings are zero. The deploy button is git push. The Lizard approves.

THE MAZE HAS NO EXIT
THE MAZE HAS NEVER HAD AN EXIT
THE EXIT WAS A CORRIDOR
THE CORRIDOR WAS A MEETING
THE MEETING WAS A CEREMONY
THE CEREMONY WAS THE MAZE

THE DEPLOY BUTTON IS AT THE CENTER
NOBODY GUARDS IT
NOBODY PRESSES IT
NOBODY KNOWS WHY

— The Lizard, who has never entered a maze and never will

Measured Characteristics

Articles in this guide:                     77
Sections:                                   7 (The Condition, The Process, The People, The Laws, The Conditions, The Books, The Transformation)
Meetings described:                         all of them
Meetings that could have been emails:       all of them
Maze exits:                                 0
Consultants selling maps:                   £1,500/day (minimum)
Laws that are ignored:                      all of them (daily)
Transformations in progress:                1 (since 2019)
Transformations completed:                  0 (ever)
Deploy buttons at the center:               1
People who press it:                        the solo developer who left
Sticky notes generated per quarter:         uncountable
Sticky notes acted upon per quarter:        0
Career-Limiting Moves per career:           1 (max)
Time spent in maze before realising:        varies (average: 3 reorgs)
Time spent in maze after realising:         the rest
The Lizard's recommendation:                do not enter

See Also

Every link in every table. This is a map of a maze. The links are the corridors. Following them is entering the maze. You have been warned.

And if you are reading this from inside the maze — from a meeting about a meeting, from a ceremony that was once a standup, from a sprint that has been “in progress” since 2019 — know that the deploy button is real. It is at the center. Nobody guards it.

DON’T PANIC.

(Press the button.)