Why is culture so important in DevOps?

Helen Beal: Being successful in DevOps requires that most organizations change the way they work and in many respects the way they think. Humans have deeply embedded habits and behaviors that must be addressed in order to understand how to share knowledge successfully and collaborate in a transparent and effective manner. You can automate as much as you like but if your people aren’t ready to interact with each other and the processes aren’t flexible enough to allow them to do so, the efforts will fail. We regularly come across organizations that have built a bit of a CD pipeline but can’t get anyone to use it — it requires effort to push change through an organization and make it stick.

What are the elements that constitute DevOps culture?

Helen Beal: DevOps cultures are blame-free, high-trust, frictionless, highly experimental and innovative. They foster individual autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

What can a company do to achieve a successful transformation towards a real DevOps culture?

Helen Beal: The steps we recommend to change culture are:

• Self-identify as a change leader.
• Find other change leaders.
• Gain some senior level support.
• Understand that this is an evolutionary, transformation journey that will take a minimum of 12 months for a company of practically any size.
• Run an informal event like a lunch and learn and cake afternoon to identify other change agents and appetite for DevOps.
• Engage to deliver a project to assess/baseline current state – with senior stakeholders and budgets. An output must be the investment plan.
• Identify a value stream/product line to use as a pilot project – perform a VSM exercise to underpin the direction of travel and tighten the financial case for change.
• Plan journey, launch — deliver as an Agile project with a backlog and sprints — use coaching to maintain momentum and energy.

Continue The Sentence…

Devs and Ops work best together if …

…they can both work in an Agile manner on the same team.

The biggest obstacle for DevOps is…

…management not allowing for cultural change.

What promotes employee satisfaction is …

…nurturing autonomy, mastery and purpose.

The biggest advantage of autonomously-working teams is …

…they can work at high velocity and act as tension sensors to customer needs and amplify the feedback loop with the business. Helen Beal

It is important for a positive company culture to….

…celebrate and showcase success — and failure too (as this shows the organization puts high value on experimentation)!