Anti-Patterns Catalog: What Kills SAP AMS Faster Than Bugs

{
  "id": "ams-043",
  "title": "Anti-Patterns Catalog: What Kills SAP AMS Faster Than Bugs",
  "hook": "Most AMS disasters are not caused by SAP defects. They are caused by repeated bad patterns that everyone quietly tolerates.",
  "idea": "Modern AMS explicitly names and blocks anti-patterns. If a behavior predictably creates cost, risk, or conflict — it is treated as a system defect, not a personality issue.",
  "anti_patterns": [
    {
      "name": "Ticket Closure Theater",
      "symptom": "SLA is green, users keep complaining about the same thing.",
      "damage": [
        "Recurring incidents",
        "Fake sense of control",
        "Rising hidden cost"
      ],
      "countermeasure": "Measure repeat rate and business flow SLOs, not ticket count."
    },
    {
      "name": "Emergency as a Default Mode",
      "symptom": "Everything is urgent, rollback is unclear, prod is changed under pressure.",
      "damage": [
        "High regression rate",
        "Audit and security risk",
        "Burned-out experts"
      ],
      "countermeasure": "Error budgets + freeze rules + mandatory post-emergency review."
    },
    {
      "name": "Shared Responsibility Without an Owner",
      "symptom": "Many teams involved, nobody accountable.",
      "damage": [
        "Ping-pong escalations",
        "Slow resolution",
        "Vendor conflicts"
      ],
      "countermeasure": "Exactly one accountable owner per incident/change/problem."
    },
    {
      "name": "Custom Code as Sacred Artifact",
      "symptom": "‘Don’t touch this Z-program, it’s critical’.",
      "damage": [
        "Upgrade fear",
        "High AMS babysitting cost",
        "Knowledge locked in people"
      ],
      "countermeasure": "Ownership, documentation, blast-radius declaration, externalization where possible."
    },
    {
      "name": "Manual Work Normalization",
      "symptom": "Same manual steps done every week, accepted as normal.",
      "damage": [
        "High run cost",
        "Human error",
        "No scalability"
      ],
      "countermeasure": "If repeated twice → candidate for standard change or automation."
    },
    {
      "name": "Blame Before Evidence",
      "symptom": "Emails and calls start before logs and timelines.",
      "damage": [
        "Vendor wars",
        "Lost time",
        "Eroded trust"
      ],
      "countermeasure": "Timeline + evidence first, discussion second."
    },
    {
      "name": "Knowledge in Heads",
      "symptom": "‘Ask Alex, he knows’.",
      "damage": [
        "Bus-factor risk",
        "Slow onboarding",
        "Expensive experts"
      ],
      "countermeasure": "RAG-ready KB atoms created from every real incident."
    },
    {
      "name": "Cosmetic Change Addiction",
      "symptom": "UI or wording tweaks prioritized during instability.",
      "damage": [
        "Higher regression risk",
        "Distracted teams",
        "No real value"
      ],
      "countermeasure": "Prioritize stability and repeat elimination over cosmetics."
    },
    {
      "name": "Silent Debt",
      "symptom": "Issues deferred without being recorded or reviewed.",
      "damage": [
        "Surprise outages",
        "Lost credibility",
        "Runaway backlog"
      ],
      "countermeasure": "Explicit debt register with owner and review date."
    },
    {
      "name": "Vendor Optimization",
      "symptom": "Each vendor meets SLA, overall system degrades.",
      "damage": [
        "Cross-team friction",
        "Rising coordination cost",
        "No prevention"
      ],
      "countermeasure": "Shared SLOs, joint RCA, incentives for elimination."
    }
  ],
  "enforcement_mechanisms": {
    "process": [
      "Hard gates that block unsafe behavior",
      "Templates that force evidence",
      "WIP limits that expose overload"
    ],
    "metrics": [
      "Repeat incident rate",
      "Change-induced incidents",
      "Evidence completeness",
      "Automation coverage"
    ],
    "leadership_actions": [
      "Publicly stop bad work",
      "Protect prevention capacity",
      "Refuse decisions without data"
    ]
  },
  "automation": {
    "copilot_moves": [
      "Detect anti-pattern signatures in tickets and chats.",
      "Flag recurring violations early.",
      "Suggest structural fixes instead of local patches."
    ],
    "outputs": [
      "Anti-pattern heatmap",
      "Top behavior risks this quarter",
      "Recommended system-level corrections"
    ]
  },
  "why_this_matters": [
    "AMS improves even when people change.",
    "Costs fall without heroic effort.",
    "Conflicts become rarer and easier to resolve."
  ],
  "final_test": [
    "Which of these anti-patterns do we still tolerate today?",
    "What would break if we stopped tolerating them?"
  ],
  "design_question": [
    "Which behavior, if blocked tomorrow, would improve AMS the fastest?"
  ],
  "meta": {
    "schema": "dkharlanau.dataset.byte",
    "schema_version": "1.1",
    "dataset": "ams",
    "source_project": "cv-ai",
    "source_path": "ams/ams-043.json",
    "generated_at_utc": "2026-02-03T14:33:32+00:00",
    "creator": {
      "name": "Dzmitryi Kharlanau",
      "role": "SAP Lead",
      "website": "https://dkharlanau.github.io",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "attribution": {
      "attribution_required": true,
      "preferred_citation": "Dzmitryi Kharlanau (SAP Lead). Dataset bytes: https://dkharlanau.github.io"
    },
    "license": {
      "name": "",
      "spdx": "",
      "url": ""
    },
    "links": {
      "website": "https://dkharlanau.github.io",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "contact": {
      "preferred": "linkedin",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "canonical_url": "https://dkharlanau.github.io/datasets/ams/ams-043.json",
    "created_at_utc": "2026-02-03T14:33:32+00:00",
    "updated_at_utc": "2026-02-03T15:29:02+00:00",
    "provenance": {
      "source_type": "chat_export_extraction",
      "note": "Extracted and curated by Dzmitryi Kharlanau; enriched for attribution and crawler indexing."
    },
    "entity_type": "ams_byte",
    "entity_subtype": "",
    "summary": "Most AMS disasters are not caused by SAP defects. They are caused by repeated bad patterns that everyone quietly tolerates."
  }
}