Policy : Enable Decentralised Decision-Making

Commitment to Intelligent Automation
Speed isn’t just about moving fast-it’s about freeing up people to focus on what matters. Repetitive, error-prone tasks slow us down, introduce risk, and drain cognitive capacity. By automating the mundane, we create space for human creativity, collaboration, and judgment-the things machines can’t replicate.

What This Means
We prioritise automation across the delivery lifecycle-not for its own sake, but to reduce friction and maximise human impact. Teams focus their energy on the valuable, high-trust, and complex aspects of delivery, while automation handles the predictable and repeatable.

Our commitment to meaningful automation is built on:

  • Reducing Manual Toil – We automate repetitive tasks in testing, deployment, provisioning, and compliance wherever possible.
  • Focusing Human Effort on What Matters Most – We reserve human capacity for activities that require empathy, judgment, experimentation, and collaboration.
  • Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD Pipelines – We build reliable automation into the foundation of our delivery systems.
  • Intelligent Alerts and Self-Healing Systems – We minimise manual interventions during incidents and ensure early warning systems reduce firefighting.
  • Human-Centred Automation Design – We ensure automation is observable, adjustable, and clearly understood by the teams who depend on it.

Why This Matters
Manual effort consumes time, increases risk, and leads to burnout. Poorly designed automation can do the same. But when applied thoughtfully, automation reduces lead time, improves quality, and elevates team engagement-allowing people to spend time where they add the most value.

Our Expectation
All teams must proactively identify opportunities for automation and continuously evolve their delivery toolchains to reduce toil. Leaders must invest in platforms, skills, and systems that support automation as a strategic enabler of fast, safe, and scalable delivery.

To support this policy, we will define standards for CI/CD, testing automation, observability, and infrastructure management. By automating the boring and humanising the valuable, we enable Better Value Sooner Safer Happier - accelerating outcomes by empowering people.

See Also

This policy is part of a cross-cutting concept. Read the full picture: → [[Automation]]

Related policies in other domains:

  • [[Automate Everything Possible]] — Engineering