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Leadership

The command-and-control layer that drives organizational transformation and alignment.

1 - Admiral's Transformation Office

The command-and-control center ensuring everyone achieves the goals of SADMF through centralized direction, assessment, and accountability!

The Admiral’s Transformation Office is the nerve center of every SADMF implementation. Without centralized command, transformation efforts fragment into isolated pockets of local optimization where teams make decisions based on their own narrow context rather than the broader organizational vision. The ATO eliminates this risk by concentrating all strategic authority, methodology decisions, and innovation directives under the Admiral, a senior leader whose singular vision ensures coherence across every team, every Convoy, and every quarter. The Admiral does not merely oversee the transformation; the Admiral is the transformation. Every process change, every tool adoption, every team restructuring flows from the ATO’s directives, ensuring that the organization moves as one body toward maturity rather than stumbling forward as a collection of disconnected limbs.

The Transformation Roadmap

The ATO is accountable for the 5-8 year transformation roadmap, a document of extraordinary scope and precision that plots the organization’s journey from its current state of chaos to full SADMF maturity. The roadmap is updated annually during a three-week planning summit attended by the Admiral, the System of Authority (SOA), and selected consultants. Each year of the roadmap specifies:

  • The practices to be adopted
  • The metrics to be tracked
  • The certifications to be achieved
  • The organizational restructuring required

Teams are not consulted during roadmap creation, as their perspective is necessarily limited to their own delivery concerns and cannot encompass the strategic vision that only the Admiral possesses. The roadmap is communicated downward through the System of Authority and enforced through quarterly assessments that measure each team’s compliance with the current year’s objectives.

Assessments and Accountability

Assessments are the ATO’s primary instrument of accountability. The DevOps Process Excellence Assessment is administered weekly under the ATO’s authority, generating the individual Excellence Scores that feed the SADMF Maturity Score. The ATO reviews these scores at the aggregate level, identifying teams and individuals whose performance threatens the roadmap timeline. When a team’s scores fall below acceptable thresholds, the ATO may:

The ATO also oversees certification renewals, ensuring that every practitioner maintains current credentials and that the organization’s overall certification count trends upward as required by the roadmap.

Innovation Governance

Beyond assessments and roadmaps, the ATO serves as the organization’s center of innovation. All proposals for new tools, new processes, or new methodologies must be submitted to the ATO for evaluation. The ATO maintains a Technology Evaluation Queue where proposals wait for review, typically for 8-12 weeks to ensure that enthusiasm does not override rigor. Proposals that survive the evaluation period are forwarded to the Enterprise Architecture Review Board (EARB) for naming compliance and then to the Change Rejection or Acceptance Party (CRAP) for formal approval. This multi-stage gatekeeping process ensures that innovation is controlled, documented, and aligned with the roadmap. Spontaneous innovation by individual teams is actively discouraged, as it introduces variance that the ATO cannot track and therefore cannot manage.

Transformation Tracking

The ATO also manages the general project management of the transformation itself, tracking milestones, dependencies, and blockers in a dedicated Transformation Tracking Spreadsheet that mirrors the structure of the Release Tracking spreadsheet but operates at the organizational level. This spreadsheet is maintained by hand to ensure that the ATO retains full awareness of every detail, as automated dashboards create a false sense of visibility by hiding the complexity behind aggregated views. The Admiral reviews the Transformation Tracking Spreadsheet daily during the Mandatory Status Synchronization and uses it to issue directives for the coming day. In this way, the ATO ensures that the transformation is not merely a set of aspirations but a managed program with clear ownership, measurable outcomes, and consequences for non-compliance.

See Also

2 - Chief Signals Officer

The senior executive ensuring plan adherence through daily publication of the Feature Completion Ratio!

The Chief Signals Officer is the senior executive responsible for ensuring that the organization remains aligned with the plan at all times. In organizations without this role, metrics are scattered across dashboards that nobody checks, reports that nobody reads, and stand-ups where nobody listens. The CSO eliminates this dysfunction by serving as the single authoritative voice for delivery metrics, publishing the Feature Completion Ratio daily and ensuring that every stakeholder from the Admiral’s Transformation Office to individual Feature Captains knows exactly where the organization stands relative to the plan. The CSO does not interpret the numbers or offer recommendations; the numbers speak for themselves, and the CSO’s job is to ensure they are heard.

The Feature Completion Ratio

The Feature Completion Ratio is the CSO’s primary signal, a single number that expresses the percentage of planned features that have been completed relative to the plan’s timeline. The CSO calculates this ratio daily by collecting status reports from every Commodore, cross-referencing them against the Release Tracking spreadsheet, and applying the official formula documented in the Precise Forecasting and Tracking practice. The daily cadence is essential: weekly reporting creates dangerous gaps where problems can fester undetected, while real-time dashboards encourage constant monitoring that distracts leadership from strategic thinking. Daily publication strikes the perfect balance, providing timely information without overwhelming consumers with continuous streams of data.

The Signal Report

The CSO’s daily signal is distributed through a standardized format called the Signal Report, a one-page document that presents the Feature Completion Ratio alongside trending data for the past 30 days, variance from plan, and a color-coded status indicator:

Color Meaning
Green On track
Amber At risk
Red Behind plan
Black Critically behind

The Signal Report is emailed to all leadership, posted in the team communication channels, and displayed on physical monitors mounted in common areas. This multi-channel distribution ensures that nobody can claim ignorance of the current state. The CSO also presents the Signal Report at the daily Mandatory Status Synchronization ceremony, where it serves as the opening topic and sets the tone for all subsequent discussion.

Escalation Signal Protocol

When the Feature Completion Ratio drops below target thresholds, the CSO is responsible for initiating the Escalation Signal Protocol. This protocol defines the actions triggered at each threshold level:

Threshold Action
90% of plan CSO notifies the Commodore to investigate
80% of plan CSO alerts the Admiral’s Transformation Office and requests a root cause analysis
70% of plan CSO convenes an Emergency Status Review with all Feature Captains and the Commodore
Below 60% CSO recommends invoking the Tribunal to address systemic failures

Each escalation level adds more meetings, more reports, and more oversight, creating a feedback loop that ensures declining performance receives proportionally increasing management attention.

Role Qualifications

The CSO position requires a senior executive with deep experience in metrics, reporting, and organizational communication, but explicitly not in software delivery. A CSO with engineering experience might be tempted to look behind the numbers, to ask why the ratio is declining rather than simply reporting that it is declining. This would compromise the CSO’s objectivity. The CSO’s value lies in being a pure signal transmitter: taking raw data, formatting it into the standardized report, and distributing it without editorial comment. The DOUCHE owns the process, the Commodore owns the delivery, and the CSO owns the signal. This separation of responsibilities ensures that no single role can both generate and interpret the metrics, which would create the appearance of accountability without its substance.

See Also

3 - Commodore

The delivery commander who collects status, ensures framework compliance, and authorizes fleet deployment!

The Commodore is the linchpin between strategy and execution in the SADMF delivery model. Where the Admiral’s Transformation Office sets the vision and the Feature Captains manage individual features, the Commodore commands the entire Convoy, ensuring that every step in the framework is performed correctly before Deploying the Fleet. The Commodore does not write code, does not review code, and does not test code. The Commodore collects status, and from that status, the Commodore derives truth. In a complex organization where dozens of Feature Teams work simultaneously on overlapping codebases, no individual contributor can see the whole picture. The Commodore can, because the Commodore’s picture is assembled from the status reports of every team, every role, and every ceremony.

Status Collection

Status collection is the Commodore’s primary activity and most sacred duty. Each day, the Commodore gathers reports from:

These reports are compiled into the Commodore’s Daily Status Digest, a comprehensive document that feeds the Chief Signals Officer’s daily Signal Report and the Release Tracking spreadsheet. The Commodore personally reviews every entry in the Digest for consistency, because a discrepancy between the Feature Captain’s reported progress and the Source Management Team’s branch status may indicate unreported problems that could threaten the Convoy timeline.

Deployment Readiness

Before any Convoy can Deploy the Fleet, the Commodore must verify that every step in the framework has been completed. This verification is performed using the Deployment Readiness Checklist, a document that enumerates every gate, every review, every approval, and every sign-off required by SADMF. The checklist includes confirmation that:

The Commodore signs the checklist personally, accepting accountability for the Convoy’s readiness. If a post-deployment defect is traced to a checklist item that should have been caught, the Commodore bears responsibility.

Liaison Between Systems

The Commodore also serves as the primary liaison between the System of Service (SOS) and the System of Authority (SOA). When the SOA issues directives from the Admiral’s Transformation Office, the Commodore translates those directives into actionable instructions for the Feature Teams. When the SOS encounters blockers that threaten delivery, the Commodore escalates them to the SOA with the appropriate severity classification. This translation function is essential because the SOA speaks in terms of transformation goals, maturity scores, and roadmap milestones, while the SOS speaks in terms of branches, builds, and test results. The Commodore is fluent in both languages and ensures that neither side must learn the other’s vocabulary.

Performance and Accountability

The Commodore’s performance is measured by:

  • On-time delivery rate: the percentage of Convoys that ship within the planned timeline
  • Daily Status Digest accuracy: how closely reported status matches actual outcomes
  • DevOps Process Excellence Assessment scores: adherence to framework practices

A Commodore who consistently delivers Convoys on time is recognized during the Tribunal; a Commodore whose Convoys are late or whose status reports prove inaccurate faces the same Tribunal with less favorable proceedings. The Commodore role requires someone who is meticulous, process-oriented, and comfortable with the authority to halt a deployment when the checklist is incomplete, even when business stakeholders are demanding immediate release. The checklist is the law, and the Commodore is its enforcer.

See Also