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-=[ FractIT(TM) ]=-
Fractal IT(TM) - a CTO-grade operating model that leverages
cognitive and behavioral science to make teams autonomous, reduce
managerial overhead, and surface predictable delivery without heavy
program management.
FOUNDATIONS
"Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the
complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity."
Charles Mingus
Modern IT leadership faces two linked pressures: deliverables must
scale across more teams, and traditional program controls
increasingly slow down delivery and obscure where work actually
happens. Fractal IT(TM) reframes organizational design so that
lightweight, repeatable interfaces and human-friendly artifacts
create clear ownership, fast handoffs, and embedded control. The
method intentionally trades prescriptive process for a small set of
measurable signals and bounded interfaces so that tactical
coordination emerges from operational practice rather than from
top-down project orchestration. The result for a CTO is predictable
throughput, fewer cross-team escalations, and a smaller,
higher-leverage management footprint.
What this gives a CTO:
- Predictable delivery without expanding a centralized PMO.
- Faster onboarding and lower coordination cost across silos.
- Clear escalation paths and automated guardrails for capacity
tuning.
- Reduced interruptions to engineering flow and higher focus time.
- Measurable levers (operational indicators) that map directly to
remediation actions.
- A governance surface that scales by replication rather than by
bureaucracy.
Fractal IT(TM) is a strategic toolkit for CTOs who want durable,
low-friction scalability: it is governance by design, not
governance by committee.
Some of our services include:
- Security Audit and Consulting
- VDI image creation and optimization
- Fixed-cost, rapid desktop builds and managed desktops
- Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM)
Deployment and Configuration
- Information Technology Services and Staffing
- Application Rationalization and Packaging
- Training
- Datacenter Design and Migration
All with Predictable Costs and Consistent Quality!
Memory Overload
The effect of this specialized terminology is that it places an
excessive load on an individual's cognitive resources. When project
management practices become overly complex, parties need to
constantly refer back to documentation or training materials to
understand or remember specific terms. While this complexity may
not be an issue for Project Managers themselves, asking non-project
managers to learn entire disciplines, in addition to their normal
duties, can detract from their primary responsibilities and areas
of expertise.
Most modern systems are typically organized into a flat and
expansive list of concepts with no internal coherence or mnemonic
structures, this places large loads on memory and constrains one's
ability to mentally track the state of a project at any given time.
In "The truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid", Cognitive
Scientist Donald A. Norman wrote a critique that resonates with the
challenges of navigating flat, unstructured systems-especially in
modern project environments.
"Human memory is a fragile thing. Actually, for most purposes it is
convenient to think of human memory as consisting of two parts: a
short-term memory and a long-term memory ... Short-term memory is,
as the name suggests, limited in duration and quantity: about five
to seven items is the limit. Thus, do not expect a user to remember
the contents of a message for much longer than it is visible on the
terminal. Long-term memory is robust, but it faces two
difficulties: getting stuff in so that it is properly organized and
getting stuff out, so that it can be found when needed. Learning is
difficult, unless there is a good structure, and it is visible to
the learner. The system designer must provide sensible assistance
to the user so that the material can be structured. There are lots
of sensible memory aids that can be provided, but the most powerful
and sensible of all is understanding. Make a system so that it can
be understood and the memory follows with ease. [1]
It's important to acknowledge the merits of specialized language,
notably its ability to streamline communication within tightly
aligned teams. But as Gary Simmonds MD MS FAANS wrote, "it kind of
feels good once mastered. Fluency signifies that we are part of the
club, a member of the guild."[2] This sense of mastery and
belonging is powerful-but it comes with a cost. Inclusion by way of
specialized fluency is inherently selective; it draws boundaries
around who can participate fully and who must first earn access.
The resulting exclusions are not accidental or malicious-they are
structural and inevitable. In contexts like project management,
which must operate across diverse teams and disciplines, such
boundary-forming language can hinder clarity, delay onboarding, and
increase cognitive load. Natural, everyday language offers a more
equitable and cognitively efficient alternative.
What is needed therefore is a means to remove overhead while
maintaining the sought-after protections of traditional project
management. This can be accomplished by structuring your teams and
work flow so that it can be intuitively understood and it's
processes predictable. That is, you can move the workload from the
people to the structure so that efficient task management, whether
project or issue related, emerges naturally; minimizing the need
for centralized controls.
Laying a project management process over an organization is like
creating a city, then cutting out by-ways to build the roads. A
properly planned city begins with the grid, laying out both major
and minor roads, and only then do the buildings go up. Likewise,
processes and lines of communication, in accordance with Human
Nature, must be established first. Only then can the structures be
built around them.
Indeed, the solution to the complexity of project management may
not lie in creating yet another new or better process, but rather
in rethinking what project management means. It's about
understanding that project management is ultimately about achieving
goals. It's about empowering teams to work effectively, rather than
burdening them with complex processes and jargon. Rather than
redefining project management, we can reduce the need for it by
embedding clarity and coordination into the structure
itself-creating a more efficient and enjoyable work environment..
Project Management, in the old sense, would no longer be necessary.
The Magic Number
The main cognitive ability responsible for enabling understanding
of a complex system is short-term memory. When we are able to hold
all the relevant "moving parts" of a system in our minds
simultaneously, it becomes easier to understand the interworking of
the component parts. However, short-term memory has limits.
The "Magic Number"[3], often referred to as Miller's law, is a
concept first introduced by cognitive psychologist George A.
Miller. It suggests that the number of objects an average human can
hold in short-term memory is around 7 ± 2. Fortunately, this limit
can be expanded somewhat through "chunking". Chunking is a process
in cognitive psychology in which small individual pieces of
information are bound together to create a meaningful whole. The
"chunks" improve short-term retention of the material, thus
bypassing the limited capacity of working memory and consequently
the information can be retrieved more easily due to this grouping.
Ultimately, if we seek to define an environment and process that
best facilitates understanding, we must first work within the
confines of human nature and limitations.
Why "Fractal"?
Fractals are infinite patterns that are self-similar across
different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process
iteratively in an ongoing loop. Fractals have been employed to
describe diverse behavior in economics, finance, the stock market,
astronomy, and computer science. They describe geometric structures
that can be divided into parts, each of which is a scaled-down
replica of the whole. Fractal patterns are also frequently found in
nature due to their ability to generate limitless patterns from a
relatively small set of instructions.
(GIF) Fractals in Queen Anne's Lace
Fig. 1 - Fractals in Queen Anne's Lace
Fractals have long been used in man-made structures. The
anthropologist Ron Eglash[4] noticed these patterns while studying
aerial photographs of a traditional Tanzanian village. He found
that the huts were organized as a series of nested circular
clusters. This arrangement, which he recognized from his former
days as a Silicon Valley computer engineer, is a characteristic of
fractals. Eglash argued that the fractals in African villages are
not simply accidental; rather, they serve specific practical needs
by facilitating the management of the village and by communicating
vital information directly through the layout of the village
itself.
(GIF) Village fractal lay out
Fig. 2 - Village fractal lay out
In the process of organizing entities into nested fractal sets, we
are fundamentally establishing a hierarchy of structures that
exhibit self-similarity. Each subsequent tier in this hierarchy is
a scaled-down replica of the one above. This characteristic
facilitates the prediction of the appearance of the next level.
Furthermore, the inherent similarity across all levels allows for
an intuitive comprehension of the entire structure through the
examination of any single component. This principle underlies the
frequent utilization of fractals in the modeling of intricate
natural phenomena such as coastlines, cloud formations, and
snowflakes. Despite the high degree of complexity inherent in these
phenomena, their fractal properties render them more comprehensible
and "self-documenting".
Coincidentally, systems organized in fractal patterns naturally
lend themselves to "chunking". Fractal structures facilitate the
division of complex information into manageable chunks where each
level of the hierarchy is a self-contained unit that mirrors the
structure of the whole. This recursive design reduces cognitive
load and allows for more efficient processing and recall of
information. Therefore, fractal organizational techniques, by their
very nature, optimize our cognitive capacity as outlined by
Miller's Law.
The Middle Path
Often misrepresented in media, the "10,000-Hour Rule"[5] is a
concept derived from the research of psychologist K. Anders
Ericsson and popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book
"Outliers". This rule postulates that achieving mastery in any
skill requires a minimum of 10,000 hours of practice.
Although more recent findings have called into question some of
the specifics of the 10,000-hour rule, the broader claim, that
both quality and quantity of practice are important, still holds
true.
This form of practice is known as "Deliberate Practice", which
according to K. Anders Ericsson is defined as individualized
training activities that are highly structured, effortful and,
most importantly, highly specific. Ultimately, it is this form of
practice that is required to achieve mastery over any given
subject.
This principle is perhaps most visible in medicine, where
specialization is the default rather than the exception. No one
consults a podiatrist for heart surgery; each discipline represents
thousands of hours of deliberate practice concentrated on a narrow
domain, and patient outcomes are measurably better for it. Yet
medicine also reveals the limits of specialization taken alone, as
the field relies on general practitioners to coordinate care,
triage symptoms, and attend to the whole patient rather than any
single system. In effect, a mature and expertise-driven profession
has already converged on a hybrid model-deep specialists
coordinated by capable generalists.
It therefore stands to reason that siloed departments, given more
deliberate practice time, develop a deeper skill level, therefore
avoiding the pitfalls of inefficient and slow to market solutions.
But this high-quality output can have a cost in that siloed
structures can result in communication gaps and competing goals.
Conversely, full-stack organizations, where each team or
individual is responsible for a range of tasks across multiple
domains, can foster a comprehensive understanding of a project.
This can lead to better coordination, faster decision-making, and
increased flexibility. However, the breadth of knowledge required
in full-stack structures comes at the expense of depth of
expertise.
It's evident, therefore, that the optimal structure would utilize
a hybrid approach; an approach that combines in-depth knowledge
with communicative efficiency while avoiding competing priorities
and disunity.
Desire Paths
"Desire paths" refer to the informal trails created by repeated
human or animal movement, often representing the shortest or most
convenient route between two points. The term is sometimes
attributed to the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who
referred to them as les chemins du désir ("pathways of desire") in
his 1958 work The Poetics of Space. This concept has been widely
embraced in fields like urban planning and landscape architecture,
where these paths are seen as organic expressions of human
behavior and preferences. They highlight the contrast between
planned design and actual use, offering valuable insights into how
spaces are navigated and experienced.
Just as physical desire paths reflect the most intuitive routes
chosen by individuals, virtual desire paths in business processes
reveal when the simplest, most efficient route differs from the
prescribed route. By observing workflows and identifying friction
points, managers can redesign processes to naturally guide
employees toward desired outcomes, reducing unnecessary steps and
improving productivity. In essence, this creates a synergy between
human instinct and organizational structure, offering an organic
yet impactful way to streamline operations.
(GIF) A desire path in a park
Fig. 3 - A desire path in a park
IMPLEMENTATION
Any department or silo can adopt this governance pattern to balance
local autonomy with system-wide coherence. Rather than prescribing
specific tasks, it defines layered responsibilities with
well-defined interfaces that make workload movement and
accountability explicit across teams. The result is a universal
operating model that preserves front-line decision-making while
reducing friction through coordinated visibility and bounded hand-
offs. Executives gain predictable throughput; managers gain
practical levers for tuning capacity, staffing, and workflow
boundaries without added bureaucracy.
(GIF) Example organization based on fractal sets
Fig. 4 - Example organization based on fractal sets
Level 0 - Communicates
This role handles all external communication and functions as a
single point of contact for the group. It is responsible for
assigning and prioritizing all work within the group,
consequently, offsetting some of the day-to-day steering normally
done by a manager, allowing groups to run semi-autonomously. This
function, in conjunction with the other Level 0 personnel act as a
distributed "PMO" but instead of adding an addition "dotted-line"
layer of management, this role assists and serves the needs the
group they support.
This role does not need a high level of technical expertise but
does require a high degree of communication and organizational
skills.
- Receives all external requests
- Acts as a single point of contact for the group
- Manages internal delegation
- Coordinates internal and inter-departmental activities
- Tracks group progress
- Owns all tasks assigned to the group
- Monitors overall workflow and productivity
- Advises L3 on necessary workflow boundary and staff adjustments
Communication via L0 channels must simultaneously be the easiest
or desired mode of communication, bottlenecks or delays introduced
at L0 must be address immediately
Level 1 - Supports
This role is responsible to keeping the existing environment
operational and requires an intermediate skill set in a specific
field.
- Responsible for keeping the existing environment operational
- Addresses all operational issues
- Submits feedback from the field and informs Engineering and
Architecture of any environmental changes
- "Tactical" engineering
- Advises L0 on support and user interaction changes
Level 2 - Implements
This role is responsible for implementing all production changes
and requires an expert level skill set in a specific field.
- Escalation point for L1
- Produces all automation
- Manages all ongoing automation and automated maintenance
- User acceptance testing
- Implements all production changes
- Advises L3 on technology improvements
Level 3 - Designs
This role evaluates and certifies all new technology, architects
all integrated solutions and maintains operational efficiency.
This role consists of mostly full-stack engineers with expert
level skill in multiple fields.
- Escalation point for L2
- Produces "Proof-of-concepts"
- Monitors the industry trends
- Evaluates emerging technologies
- Manages work responsibility and silo boundaries
- Responsible for all technology "steering" and strategic
planning
- Responsible for making all necessary adjustments to workflow
boundaries and staff allocation as required to prevent
bottlenecks.
Team Lead/Management
With L0 managing daily operations and L3 guiding technical
direction, management is freed up to focus on strategic
initiatives, human resource issues, staffing and corporate
alignment. This delineation of responsibilities facilitates a
flatter organizational structure, enhancing decision-making
efficiency and streamlining communication channels. Moreover, it
empowers front-line teams with greater autonomy, thereby
cultivating innovation, agility and responsiveness.
Virtual PMO
Each department embeds an L0 role charged with end-to-end tracking
of its internal work and all external communication. Rather than
centralizing project management, these L0s form a constantly
synchronized network, effectively a virtual PMO, so that individual
contributors stay focused on delivery rather than status updates.
Since each L0 role is embedded directly within its own department,
there's no need for constant reporting and ambiguous dotted-line
reporting to other managers. This direct alignment ensures that
L0s prioritize the department's goals without being pulled in
conflicting directions.
Ownership, Escalations and Communication
In most IT organizations, an escalation becomes the safety valve
for issues that frontline teams can’t crack. However, when key
performance indicators such as ticket close rates or mean time to
resolution become rigid targets, they can distort behavior, a
phenomenon described by Goodhart’s Law: "When a measure becomes a
target, it ceases to be a good measure." Support teams under
pressure to meet those metrics may be tempted to escalate
prematurely, not to achieve genuine resolution, but to preserve
their statistics. This misalignment of incentives undermines both
service quality and the development of first-line responders.
To preserve the integrity of escalations as a learning and problem-
solving tool, every request for assistance should be logged as
such, while the originating team retains full ownership and
accountability for the task. In practice, this means that both the
front-line and assisting staff be present throughout the entire
process. Only in cases where the ticket was demonstrably
mis-assigned should formal ownership transfer occur; and in those
instances it should be treated as a lateral transfer, not an
escalation.
To ensure that assistance still fulfills its pedagogical purpose,
the assisting party retains ownership of a subordinate "Assistance
Task" which spells out mandatory knowledge transfers and skill-gap
tracking.
This retained ownership carries a second, quieter benefit: it keeps
the true cost of an escalation visible. When a task is handed off,
its cost transfers with it-the originating team’s ledger goes quiet
while the receiving team absorbs the effort as if it were its own,
and two teams’ worth of work is recorded as one. Assistance, by
contrast, keeps both parties’ time booked against the same retained
task, so the full cost of resolving the issue accrues in one place.
Escalation stops appearing free to those who reach for it, and
recurring draws on another team’s expertise surface as a measurable
pattern rather than dispersing, unattributed, across the
organization. Absent this, internal "economies" quietly distort:
cost flows without being priced, and the capability gaps that ought
to drive staffing and up-skilling decisions stay hidden.
By embedding these guardrails, organizations can ensure that
escalations remain true to their purpose-resolving complex
incidents while simultaneously up-skilling frontline support staff,
and keeping the real cost of coordination honest and visible.
Thresholds and "Auto-scaling"
The L3 team owns end-to-end workflow health: they continuously
monitor throughput and cycle-time metrics, then dynamically adjust
SLAs, refine handover thresholds, and recommend targeted training
or staffing changes to smooth out capacity swings. Much like an
auto-scaling microservice spins up instances when load spikes, L3
scales human resources and tightens hand-off criteria when
bottlenecks loom-ensuring that work flows between teams without
friction, service commitments stay within agreed limits, and
overall productivity remains rock-solid.
This approach requires an organizational design where people can
be flexibly seconded across departments without formal job
transfers, backed by cross-functional training and clear role
charters. This can be a departure from traditional headcount
models, hinging on transparent governance and broad buy-in.
Communication Channels
Communication channels are the main tool for coordination:
dedicated pathways carry work and user requests, assistance calls,
priority updates, status reports, capacity metrics, and up-skilling
signals. L0 teams run these channels, turning raw inputs into
concise artifacts and routing them to the right people,
so engineers receive only actionable, contextual work. The vPMO
reads these normalized outputs for cross-silo visibility and
priority tuning without reworking each department's data. A steady
cadence, minimal artifacts, and strict data minimization keep noise
low, protect delivery focus, and make every priority change
traceable.
(GIF) Noisy communication
Fig. 5 - Noisy communication
(GIF) Efficient channels of communication
Fig. 6 - Efficient channels of communication
...as a Service
Self-Service is crucial to any IT organization, but sadly no IT
process has been more misused. What was originally intended to
allow teams to bypass encumbrances can rapidly devolve into a
means of off-loading responsibility.
An arduous self-service experience is a failure regardless of the
outcome as the emotional memory of a frustrating interaction will
persist even when the issue or request has been technically
resolved.
Emotional memory refers to the recollections tied to events that
elicit an emotional response. It consists of learning, storing,
and remembering the events associated with a physiological and
emotional response. The American Psychological Association (APA)
states that memories could be implicit (non-conscious) or explicit
(conscious), and memories connected to strong positive or negative
emotions are retained better due to activity in the amygdala
region of the brain.
Guidelines
To ensure that Self-Service tools produce maximum results follow
these guidelines:
- Look at the "Concept-to-Cash" value stream. How many teams
does the process have to go through? If the Self-Service tool or
process does not shorten the value stream, consider another
solution.
- If the end-user is not better-off with the proposed
self-service tool in their estimation, consider another solution.
- All the information required to use the process or tool should
be found within the four corners of the form. Do not require users
to go elsewhere.
- Take the user's perspective! Ask for information in accordance
with the user's priorities and knowledge; and avoid using terms
unfamiliar to non-specialists.
- Follow good user interface practices. The field of UI
development is very robust and has been the subject of much
research[6], leverage this information wherever possible. Some
examples...
- Stick to one direction, never zig-zag. E.g. Left to Right,
or Top to Bottom.
- Always provide a progress indicator for multi-stage
processes.
- Never make a user wait for more than three seconds before
providing some visual queue that something is happening (E.g.
"spinning beach-ball").
- Get buy-in from all affected parties before implementing a
self-service process where work ownership or work thresholds may
not be clear.
- Never ask for information that you can obtain by other means
and never ask for the same information twice throughout the entire
user experience. Remember that you are not the only party
interacting with the end-user.
Process Improvement
The ultimate "mission statement" of IT is simply to ensure that
the clients are as productive as possible. That being the case,
the L1 group, being closest to the user will always be the best
positioned to report on user state.
L1 is responsible for promptly reporting scaling, SLA, skills gap,
work-threshold, and other environmental impediments to the
appropriate technical tier (L2 or L3 by domain) using a concise
artifact that includes observed symptom, frequency, user impact,
recent changes, and any interim mitigations. L0 may normalize and
forward these artifacts for cross-silo visibility. L2 and L3 must
triage reports, perform root-cause analysis, and deliver process
or technical remedies; every recommendation must be logged,
assigned an owner, given measurable success criteria, and tracked
to closure.
Post-implementation verification by L1 is required to confirm
user-facing improvement and to surface remaining up-skilling or
handoff adjustments; where fixes require staffing changes, L3 may
reallocate existing resources and management approves new
headcount.
Priorities
The importance of directing efforts to high priority tasks is a
well beaten path; but what is still often a point of contention
within organizations is when priorities conflict between new and
remedial work.
Therefore, in order to unite an organization it's necessary first
to define a holistic and objective prioritization blueprint. In
this manner we can assign consistent prioritization across all
types of labor whether it is issue, request or project related.
Defining priorities for tasks relating to external customers is
outside the scope of this document and is typically the
responsibility of Finance in collaboration with Product and Data
teams. Operational owners should surface measurable signals (KPIs)
and cost inputs to support financial attribution, but formal ROI
modeling, CLV calculations, and investment approvals belong to
cross-functional financial processes.
Loss vs. Degradation
The ultimate arbiter of priority must always be to what degree the
end-user is able to fulfill their job function, as every moment of
degraded or lost service equates to diminished or lost revenue for
the organization as a whole.
A loss of service is limited to job critical functions.
New Services
Determining the priority of a new product or service is a bit more
complicated as there is no existing state to check, rather it must
be compared to the ever fluctuating standards set by the industry
at large.
This means that users experiencing a level of service that does
not meet that which the competitor's users enjoy, are said to be
in a degraded state. Likewise, users who lack a product or service
that is mandated by law, or the absence of which represents a
critical security risk, are experiencing a loss of service.
It is important to distinguish between the lack of a competetive
service (degradation) and a new service that the lack of which
effectivly stops revenue generation (loss).
+---------------+---------------+---------------+---------------+
| State | Existing | New User | New Service |
+---------------+---------------+---------------+---------------+
| Degradation | Below normal | Requires non- | Does not meet |
| | operating | critical | or exceed |
| | specs | service | industry |
| | | | standard or |
| | | | competitor's |
| | | | service level |
| | | +---------------+
| | | | Non-critial |
| | | | security risk |
+---------------+---------------+---------------+---------------+
| Loss | Unable to | Requires | New critical |
| | fulfill a | a critical | business |
| | critical job | service | function |
| | function | +---------------+
| | | | Regulatory |
| | | | mandate |
| | | +---------------|
| | | | Critical |
| | | | security risk |
+---------------+---------------+---------------+---------------+
Table 1 - Priority Matrix
While it is acceptable that work can entail reducing the severity
of an issue from a loss to a degradation of service, such
"stop-gap" efforts should be done only in extreme cases and the
issue must never be considered closed.
Number of Users Affected
The second variable to consider is the number of users affected by
the loss or degradation of a service. Rather than assigning
arbitrary buckets such as "single user" or "multiple users", this
value is best represented by an actual and very simple calculation
of the % of the users affected.
Records must be task-centric, not user-centric. Therefore, a new
user with 5 missing services would result in 5 tasks.
VIP
Some systems set priorities based on "VIP" status. But if we stop
to ask what makes a person a VIP, we typically discovery that it
is defined by the fact that a VIP acts a resource for a number of
people who would otherwise not be operating to the fullest
capacity. So in this sense, a loss or degradation of service to a
VIP is a loss or degradation of service equal to the number of
people that report to them down-stream within the organizational
hierarchy.
One Formula to Rule Them All
To derive the priority P of any given task, first we define the
current state S as either .5 for degraded or below industry mean
service level () or 1 for loss of service, or missing regulatory
or critical security requirement. Then we multiply by the percent
of affected users U either directly or indirectly by way of
management hierarchy.
P = S X U
In this manner we can construct single unified task list with
priorities that directly correlates to corporate profitability,
while greatly simplifying task management.
The fuller meaning and usage of is reserved for future Fractal
IT(TM) software platforms that will automate the task or prioritizi
upgrade efforts.
Examples
Assuming an organization with 1000 users...
- A web site is slow for a single user.
- A new user requires access to a non-critical service.
- A single user requires an upgrade to an application that has
fallen below industry standards.
.5 X ((1 X 100) / 1000) = .05
- A user can no longer, or has yet to be granted, access to a
job critical application.
- A user requires an upgrade of a service in order to satisfy a
regulatory requirement or to mitigate a critical security risk.
- A new user requires a new job critical application.
.5 X ((1 X 100) / 1000) = .1
- 10 users cannot print to their primary printer but can still
access a secondary printer.
- A manager with 9 down-stream reports is missing a non critical
application.
.5 X ((10 X 100) / 1000) = .5
- 10 users lost access to a job critical application
- 10 users have an application that has a zero-day security flaw.
- A manager with 9 down-stream reports cannot access the payroll
website, a job critical function.
1 X ((10 X 100) / 1000) = 1
- A department head with 99 down-stream reports requires a
secondary monitor.
.5 X ((100 X 100) / 1000) = 5
- The current Single-Sign-On solution, that is used by all
members of the organization, has significantly fallen behind
industry standard of functionality.
.5 X ((1000 X 100) / 1000) = 50
- Internet connectivity is down for the entire organization
- A critical security flaw has been discovered that could
potentially put all end-points at risk.
1 X ((1000 X 100) / 1000) = 100
This process intentionally leaves out new services not explicitly
intended either to meet or exceed industry standards, to meet
regulatory compliance or to mitigate a security risk. Upgrading
without an underlying business justification is not advised. If
such work is nonetheless undertaken, it should be assigned a
status of less than .5.
Mathematical processes can sharpen decision-making, but they
demand cautious balance: Goodhart's law warns that once a measure
becomes the target it stops being a reliable measure, and heavy
aggregation amplifies data errors, bias, and opportunities for
gaming while erasing contextual nuance. Over-aggregation yields
comforting averages that hide edge cases and produce brittle
policies that fail under novelty or stress. Responsible use pairs
quantitative signals with documented data lineage, explainable
models, regular human review, and governance that preserves
qualitative judgment so numbers inform choices rather than replace
them.
Traditional ITSM/ITIL splinters the same underlying work into
incidents, changes, problems, and service requests, which creates
competing priorities (speed versus stability versus root cause),
fragmented context across parallel records, and a culture that
often optimizes ticket throughput instead of service outcomes.
Fractal IT reframes prioritization around two simple dimensions -
how many people are affected and how much service loss is
occurring - so urgency and impact are assessed consistently across
remedial and new work. That single framing reduces handoffs,
prevents duplicate records, and makes remediation choices
explicit: a breach of an operational indicator maps to one owner
and one predefined play, not three separate workflows. Pairing
that reframed priority model with the safeguards above keeps
measurement honest, preserves situational judgement, and aligns
teams on shared outcomes rather than competing processes.
CONCLUSION
This document is a concise treatment: a strategic blueprint
introducing Fractal IT(TM)'s principles, roles, and minimal artifac
that make predictable, low-friction delivery possible.
The full practitioner body of work builds directly from these
ideas, including a reframed KPI architecture that treats metrics
as operational indicators (measurement method, remediation
mapping, and anti-gaming rules); a compact library of runbooks and
Assistance-Task playbooks for frontline use; and a process
improvement-driven governance pattern for any threshold or
capacity change. A handful of additional assets - tooling/UX
patterns to enforce chunking and field limits, and certification
rubrics - rounds out the program.
Fractal IT(TM) offers a cognitive and operational redesign of the I
organization-one that replaces rigid frameworks and jargon-heavy
methodologies with intuitive, scalable structures that mirror
natural patterns of human memory and decision-making. By embedding
communication, prioritization, and ownership directly into the
architecture, it avoids the overhead of traditional IT management
while preserving clarity, accountability, and throughput. The
result is a system that supports both specialists and generalists,
enabling hybrid teams to operate with autonomy while remaining
aligned to shared goals.
This model does not merely streamline workflows-it reorients the
organization around human instinct, observable friction, and
adaptive interfaces. From L0 coordination to L3 auto-scaling, each
layer contributes to a self-regulating system that minimizes
cognitive load, maximizes responsiveness, and keeps contributors
focused on delivery rather than bureaucracy. Fractal IT(TM)
transforms the IT function from a reactive service desk into a
proactive, scalable engine for productivity.
FOOTNOTES & CITATIONS
[1] Norman, D. A., Department of Psychology and Program in
Cognitive Science Center for Human Information Processing,
University of California. (1981). The truth about Unix: The user
interface is horrid. Datamation.
http://www.ceri.memphis.edu/~smalley/ESCI7205F2009/misc_files/The_t
ruth_about_Unix_cleaned.pdf
[2] Simmonds, G. MD MS FAANS (2023, August 28). We Use
"Specialized" Language too much. Psychology Today.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rich-encounters/202308/we-u
se-specialized-language-too-much
[3] Mathy, F., & Feldman, J. (2011, December 15). What's magic
about magic numbers? chunking and data compression in short-term
memory. Cognition.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S001002771100
2733?via%3Dihub)
[4] Eglash, Ron. (1998). Fractals in African settlement
architecture.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242911162_Fractals_in_Afri
can_settlement_architecture
[5] Clear, J. (2019, June 10). How experts practice better than
the rest. James Clear.
https://jamesclear.com/deliberate-practice-strategy
[6] Penzo, M. (2006, July 12). Label Placement in Forms.
https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2006/07/label-placement-in-fo
rms.php
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