September 8: What is a Mechanism at Amazon?

Have you used an effective mechanism in your professional or personal life? Share your experience.

Danny Sheridan

Sep 8, 2021

Share your experience with mechanisms.

Source: Fact of the Day 1
Published: September 2021

What is a Mechanism at Amazon?

What is a mechanism?

A complete process that converts inputs into desired outputs on an ongoing, recurring basis.

What is the value of a mechanism?

Allow us to learn and improve from historical defects.
Enable scalable process-based solutions.
Preserve institutional knowledge through documentation.

What are the components of a mechanism?

Tool: transforms inputs to outputs.
Adoption: set incentives for your stakeholders.
Inspection: ensure continuous delivery of desired outputs.

This fact is a continuation of yesterday’s fact :

Fact of the Day 1

September 7: Good mechanisms outperform good intentions

Source: Martin HarbechPublished: September 2021 Good mechanisms outperform good intentions Ever heard sayings like this at work... "We should try harder" "We have to double down on this" "We need more sense of urgency" ... and then nothing changes. Oddly, vague statements like this make us feel better… even if we kinda know nothing meaningful is going to happe…

a year ago · 10 likes · Danny Sheridan

2 Comments

Andrea

Sep 8, 2021Liked by Danny Sheridan

Danny, did you mean to write "prevent institutional knowledge through documentation?" Don't we use documentation to *preserve* that knowledge? The original quote from the workshop was "prevent tribal knowledge through documentation," which, if I interpret correctly, meant: create documentation, so not only certain "tribes" know the correct process or mechanism.

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