Config Management Camp

5 - 7 February, 2018

Gent, Belgium

Promise theory: from configuration management to team leadership

Marco Marongiu

In this talk I will talk about how I applied Promise Theory to managing a loose team of people to most of whom I don’t have a line of command. PT was born in 2004 as Mark Burgess was looking for a model to describe CFEngine 3 but it soon proved able to model any complex system, and I had used CFEngine a lot when I became the Head of IT in Telenor Digital. With a lot of both operational and managerial tasks and an initial team size of one and then two, the challenge was big and borrowing help from other functions in the company was a necessity. A traditional management style was not going to work, so I decided to shape my own management style by using PT. This is the report of the first year.

About Speaker

Active in Linux and Free Software circles since the mid 90s, well known in the CFEngine community, Marco has worked on configuration management for several years before becoming the Head of IT in Telenor Digital in November 2016. In his new duties he found in Promise Theory, the concepts at the root of CFEngine, a way to design an unconventional management style for the new challenges ahead.