You’ve started down the road of a DevOps transformation, but you’re struggling on the journey. You might not be improving the performance of your teams and organization like you had hoped. You’re probably wondering why and, more importantly, how to get back on track. DevOps transformations are hard. If they were easy, everybody would have already gone through them.
Here are a few tips you can use to get things moving more quickly in the right direction.
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I recently did a Federal Tech Talk interview with John Gilroy on Federal News Radio talking about DevOps, a topic I get more and more excited about every day. During the discussion with John, I mentioned a lot of resources that might be helpful for people to learn more about DevOps and how to get started with it.
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DevOps is building a ton of momentum in the industry and for good reason. It has a lot of power to make a huge impact on organizations and people and because of that, more and more organizations are going through DevOps transformations.
Despite all of this momentum, I’ve had a lot of people ask me, “What is DevOps?” Truth be told, I’ve asked that same question to a lot of people, too. DevOps is enigmatic in that this simple question has a surprisingly complicated answer. Continue reading
Hot on the heels of attending User Focus 2014, I attended the DevOps Enterprise Summit last week to learn about how the “horses” were applying DevOps practices. The conference was the brainchild of Gene Kim and it brought together a fantastic community of practitioners at all levels in a variety of roles. The premise behind the conference was to showcase how organizations of all shapes, sizes, and types (i.e., the “horses”) are using DevOps practices and getting benefit from those practices. DevOps isn’t just the domain of Etsy, Netflix, Amazon, and Google (i.e., the “unicorns”). The conference more than achieved its purpose.
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I attended the one-day User Focus 2014 event last week to get the latest and greatest on the state of the user experience (UX) domain. It blows my mind that there is whole group of professionals whose sole mission in life is to make life better for me by making my experience with various devices and services awesomer. And if you haven’t gotten with the UX program yet or don’t believe it’s important, you might want to reconsider.
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We have two dogs at home, one of whom is “microchipped” in case she wanders off or we lose her. We pay $18 a year to a company to keep our dog’s information available to whomever finds her. This year’s renewal notice came in the mail and it indicated there was an online renewal option available. So I toddled over to the website, entered the microchip number, and… no record found. Hmmm. Maybe I fat fingered it. I entered it again and… no record found. So I called the customer service number and spoke to a rep. I told him I was trying to renew the account for my dog, but the website wasn’t bringing up her record. His response was, “Oh, yeah. Our website is down for maintenance. I use the same website so I can’t take payment from you right now, either. Could you try again tomorrow?” Hmmm, again. I was really surprised this company would schedule a website maintenance window in the middle of the day and it would be so significant they couldn’t even take payment from a customer. Who does that??? It left me thinking about the company and what else I could infer about them just based on this one experience, especially about their IT practices.
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I’ve heard a lot of horror stories from people about engagements with so-called Agile coaches. They want their teams to perform better and, from what they’ve learned and heard, they believe Agile is a way to address that. So they spend a bunch of money on individuals claiming to be Agile coaches hoping to find Agile goodness, but they end up just being frustrated and a little poorer. Even worse, their teams get frustrated, too, and sometimes the whole Agile transformation is put at risk because of the bad experience.
So what does a good Agile coach do?
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I’ve worked on a lot of consulting teams over my career. Many of them have been mixed teams including our employees, other contractors, and even client staff. Everyone comes with different backgrounds, perspectives, and personalities and it’s important to get everyone on the team pulling in the same direction to get the best results. You’ve probably remember times when a team wasn’t clicking either within itself or with the client. It’s not fun. It’s feels bumpy. It takes effort. It’s draining. And you feel things could be so much better.
One tool I’ve used to orient teams and get alignment is a set of team operating principles. These principles aren’t rules, per se — they define the basics for our attitudes and outlook and guide our actions. I’d much rather have a few principles that can be applied by intelligent, well-meaning people in a variety of situations than a ton of rules covering every conceivable situation.
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