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Author: Matt Selheimer

  • DevOps with purpose: ACT-ing with greater agility

    DevOps with purpose: ACT-ing with greater agility

    This is Part Four in a four-part series. In Part One, I focused on the critical first step of defining DevOps with a purpose by thinking about DevOps in the context of your organization’s applications. In Part Two, I provided four tips to fostering a DevOps culture in your organization. In Part Three, I discussed the role of tools and how they can amplify (or constrain) individual and team abilities as well as work across teams.

    In this final fourth part of the series, I’m going to weave the three previous topics of (A)pplications, (C)ulture, and (T)ools together and will show how you can ACT with purpose to start your own DevOps transformation. Your DevOps strategy should incorporate all three aspects of applications, culture, and tools. Given the breadth of those three areas, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed from the start. Here’s a tip I learned from a mentor a few years ago. Whether you are a CEO, VP, or team leader, smart leaders set a vision (often at least two or three years out) and then they make small decisions every week with the goal of generally moving the organization or team in the direction of the vision over time.

    I recommend first that you set a vision for DevOps as it relates to your Applications, your Culture, and your Tools. Let’s begin with Applications. In the first article, I shared the concept of the pace-layering model developed by Gartner. To set a DevOps vision for your applications, place each of your current applications into one of the three layers – system of record, system of differentiation, or system of innovation. Then, do the same thing for any applications you are planning to add to your portfolio.

    With that context, specific to your organization, formulate a strategic vision for how DevOps will apply to your systems in each layer. Will you seek to have DevOps principles for continuous integration and continuous delivery in place for all of your systems of innovation, and if so, by when? How about for systems of differentiation? Will DevOps be the norm for each of those applications or just some, and by when? Then ask yourself the same questions about your systems of record.

    Next, turn to your culture. In Part two, I discussed the importance of baselining the degree of collaboration you have between the business, dev, and ops as well as how you view work (in workstations or in end-to-end flow terms). Then I challenged you to incentivize people to modify their behavior both with respect to their roles and as individuals. With this as context, define your DevOps cultural vision. What does collaboration between the business and development look like in the future? What does collaboration look like between development and operations? How about between dev, QA, and ops? And let’s not forget security.

    How will you recognize when your culture is optimized for flow? For example, I recommend documenting a set of indicators that you can measure at regular intervals (e.g. quarterly). Here are three good ones. How much work-in-process (WIP) do we have for Application X today vs. how much was there a quarter ago? What is the average time it takes from the definition of a requirement to its deployment in production today vs. a quarter ago? How often did we make updates to Application X in production this quarter vs. last quarter?

    Now, let’s consider tools. Take a baseline of the tools you are using today for each step of the typical DevOps tool chain from requirements management to source code control and bug tracking through to build management, automated testing, configuration management and deployment. And don’t forget project management tools too. What is the state of your tool investment in each of these areas? Do you have gaps? Do you have multiple tools in the same area, and, if so, is that okay or do you want to standardize on one? Do your tools vary based on the applications they are used with (see pace-layering discussion above)?

    Then take an inventory of your collaboration tools across dev and ops. Are you still mostly using email and sharepoint sites? What role does instant messaging play in your dev and ops teams today? What about conference calls and meetings? Once you’ve baselined where you are today, set a vision for where you want to be in the future. Are you looking to reduce the need for conference calls and meetings, and if so by how much (time or average number of participants)? What issues are you running into around email and IM communications that need to be addressed and also for SharePoint? Have you looked at the emerging class of DevOps collaboration tools and concepts such as ITinvolve and ChatOps? What role can they play in streamlining communications, keeping people informed, and presenting information to staff so they don’t have to go hunting around for it in dozens of systems or call more meetings?

    With this as background, define your DevOps tools vision by setting priorities for filling identified gaps and rationalizing existing investments, then set a general target time frame for each area.

    Now that you’ve set a vision in each area – (A)pplications, (C)ulture, and (T)ools, it’s time to ACT. I recommend you first pick one or two applications to begin your DevOps journey. Ideally, they should be applications that are visible to the business and where you can lay claim to the impact DevOps can have on business goals like time-to-market and responsiveness to customer needs.

    Once those applications are identified, take an inventory of all the people across your organization (including the business), those responsible for the development and delivery of the applications. Develop a specific plan for how you will educate those individuals on DevOps principles (e.g. attend DevOpsDays, read The Phoenix Project, read a sets of articles and watch a set of seminar or demo recordings), and also develop a specific plan for how you will incentivize behavior changes for their roles as well as what is expected of first line managers to take individual personalities, skills, and experiences into account.

    Let me also stress that you shouldn’t ignore the people who aren’t participating in this first DevOps effort as part of your Man Standing At Beginning Of Winding Roadcommunications. Educate them as well, for example through an all-hands meeting and an email from leadership. Explain why the company is investing in DevOps transformation, why these applications have been chosen, and your long-term vision across Applications, Culture, and Tools to realize the transformation. Help them understand where the organization is going and why, and how it may impact them in the future. Avoid the perception that “the best people were picked for this and you are not among them” or that this group of people is being given license to do things that others can’t (e.g. make changes outside of the standard change management process) – otherwise, you risk reducing morale, good people leaving, and even sabotage of your DevOps efforts.

    Once you’ve completed the above, map the relevant tools you have in place today for managing the development and delivery of these applications as well as the tools on your vision roadmap defined above that will be added or rationalized in the next six months.

    By following the above recommendations, you will now have an action plan for the near term and a long-term vision you can use to guide daily decisions to move you closer to that vision. Lastly, don’t be rigid about your short-term plan or long-term vision, recognize that everyone is learning, including you, and that one of the key principles behind DevOps is the feedback loop!

    Thank you for reading this series. I hope it’s been useful to you on your DevOps journey. If you have a question or just want to share a comment, you can do so here on devopsy.kinsta.cloud or send me an email at matthew@itinvolve.com.

    Best wishes on your DevOps journey!

  • DevOps with Purpose: It’s about your culture!

    DevOps with Purpose: It’s about your culture!

    Four practical tips to fostering a DevOps culture in your organization.

    This is Part Two in a four-part series. In Part One, I focused on the critical first step of defining DevOps with a purpose by thinking about DevOps in the context of your organization’s applications.

    Today, we find more and more businesses putting pressure on IT to move faster, and, if their IT department struggles to keep up, they are often willing to “go around them” and invest in a cloud or other third-party solution on their own to get what they want, when they want it (aka “shadow IT”). What the business often lacks, however, is a full understanding of the many downstream implications that come with speeding the roll out of new services such as security assessments, integrations to legacy systems, the ongoing cost to administer the solution and take on support for it, etc. It’s true that Ops teams want to control the reliability and stability of software deployments and that can often slow things down, but they do this because that’s what they are paid to do: to deliver stable, reliable, and high-performing services.

    This conflict between the business’ desire for speed and Ops’ charter for security, reliability, and performance, has been brewing for several years and it’s time for some introspection and a few tips on how we can make things better. Ultimately, progress is all about culture, and that’s why defining DevOps with a purpose must include focusing on your organization’s IT culture.

    Tip #1: Recognize the cultural challenges between the business, Dev and Ops

    Because Development sits closer to the business in the IT value chain, there’s usually less conflict between the business’ desire to move fast and Development. That isn’t to say Dev managers aren’t sometimes frustrated by how fast the business wants things given the resources available to them, but they usually are motivated and compensated to move in sync with how fast the business wants to move.

    The first tip is to take a step back and benchmark your current culture for both Dev and Ops, because only then will you be able to understand how DevOps may impact those cultures. With Dev, ask yourself, for each line of business “Are we still doing waterfall software development with one release every year or eighteen months, or have we adopted agile methodologies that enable us to deliver multiple releases throughout the year?” Based on your answers, then ask, “Is that in line with what the business wants today? Is that inline with what we think makes the most sense or are there opportunities we could bring to the business if we adopted agile more broadly?” Finally, “what would be the value to the business and cultural impact of adopting DevOps principles for continuous integration of new software development?”

    Next, ask yourself, “How focused is our Ops team on stability, reliability and clamping down on change vs. accepting (and even desiring) change? And how does this vary by line of business or application area?” (see Part 1 of this series for why that matters) If you have a risk-averse Ops culture that’s supporting a fragile infrastructure or many legacy technologies, then you may need to tackle some of those challenges first in order to help your DevOps culture evolve. I also suggest looking at your Ops culture through a compliance lens. Ask yourself, “Are we in a heavily-regulated industry that has created its own cultural challenges in terms of change approvals and auditing that we need to take into account?” Finally, what would be the value to the business and the cultural impact of adopting DevOps principles for continuous delivery of new releases?”

    One of the hallmarks of DevOps is the ability to develop smaller pieces of incremental functionality, deploy them faster (perhaps even a few times a day), and quickly roll things back if there’s an issue. This is a big leap for many IT cultures on both the Dev and Ops side so understanding where your culture is today is a critical first step.

    Tip #2: Think about how you view work

    Do you view work as tasks done by individual teams or in an end-to-end fashion (e.g. from raw materials to finished goods and customer delivery)? DevOps transformation requires focusing on work in an end-to-end manner. Your goal should be to identify where your IT organization’s bottlenecks are, with the intent  of reducing pressure at those bottlenecks to increase end-to-end flow and, therefore, output that benefits the business.

    In The Phoenix Project, the bestselling IT novel (yes, indeed an IT novel) co-authored by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford, the character of Brent Geller in the Ops team is an obvious bottleneck. He understands his company’s IT environment better than anyone and is consumed with both solving high-profile outages and deploying new application releases, the result is that he’s constantly putting out fires and unable to get new software released that’s desperately needed by the business. The book offers a wealth of perspective on how to embrace DevOps principles and what that means for your culture. I highly recommend it. You will likely see quite a bit of your organization in the story, I know it matched my experiences in IT very well.

    Back to Top #2, ask yourself, “Is my organization optimized around end-to-end flow or are we optimizing just at the individual workstations?” If it’s the latter, then you are probably stacking up work somewhere at one or more bottlenecks and should address those first. For example, a development project isn’t done until the code is tested and deployed. So incentivizing developers to finish code without knowing when and how it will get deployed is just going to create more work in process stacking up in your IT factory. It’s just like on an automotive line where you might  see cars with shiny paint, brand new tires and cutting edge technical design, but if the cars have no seats they simply won’t be shippable.

    You might also be saddled with a lot ‘technical debt’ – where dollars and resources are tied up maintaining existing applications and infrastructure. It may be necessary for you to focus at first on reducing technical debt in order to reduce those as bottlenecks on your support and deployment teams. Ask yourself, “What technical debt do we have and who can be charged with prioritizing and reducing it?” Treat it just like credit cards and look to reduce the ‘high interest’ debt first.

    Tip #3: Incentivize your people

    Don’t assume people will change for the “greater good” – proactively incentivize them to do so.

    If you want to change your culture and create one that’s more agile – if you want to optimize for flow versus workstations then you should incentivize to initiate the cultural change you seek. Old habits are hard to break even when we want to do things differently. As executives we have the tendency to appeal to a higher business purpose and assume the folks contributing on the front lines share the same passion for the company’s success. Often they intellectually understand these goals, but you should seek to make the change relevant to how it will improve their jobs as developers, QA team members, sys admins, and architects not just how it impacts C-level objectives.

    For example, Ops folks usually take particular pride in their indispensability, but to be indispensable they have to compromise family time, working late and on weekends to push out a big high-risk deployment. They may crave the attention and recognition for such ‘extra effort’, but at the same time they are putting more pressure on themselves and more risk on the business.

    As mentioned previously, the move toward a more agile IT means deploying with far greater frequency, and that can actually help you operate with less stress and risk. Errors and fixes are likely smaller in effort, and you will be able to roll back hick-ups much faster. Sure your folks may need to stay late occasionally, but they can do their work more often during typical working hours, reclaim their weekends and have significantly less stress and pressure than via traditional large-scale rollouts where expectations are high and so is the risk of failure, re-work, and long days. Plus, with DevOps you are actually delivering on business requirements faster – instead of deploying what was needed months ago.

    Tip #4: Make it personal: everyone is different.

    Related to Tip #3, realizing that everyone is inherently different is critical to incentivizing and empowering your IT team to transform. In most IT organizations, the responsibility is on the first line manager to know their people, understand what makes them tick and channel the right talents and motivations. Some may be seeing a move to DevOps as the ideal resume enhancement opportunity. Some may feel intimidation because they are innately risk averse. Still others may not be sure what to think especially if you have one team doing DevOps while they remain on a separate team doing things “the old way”. What’s important for managers is not to stop at how to make DevOps relevant for a role, but to consider the specific individual. Ask yourself, “How will each of my team members react to this cultural change, and how can I tap into their natural motivations to make them enablers of the change not resistors?”

    From what I’ve seen, there also is a generational aspect to DevOps cultural transofrmation. Younger employees who don’t know a world without mobile phones and grew up on social media are likely more comfortable with agile, small release deployments. Those with more experience are also more likely to think about the reasons why DevOps ‘can’t work’ and it will be key for first-line managers to engage them, listen to their concerns, and work to address them in a way that benefits the organization and realizes the wisdom of their experience.

    The bottom line for Tip #4 is that if you make it personal you will build trust and that will help you to drive transformation in your organization faster. Perhaps even consider establishing a ‘Take a Developer or Ops Team Member to Lunch Day’. By working to understand each other’s worlds, challenges, pressures and goals you can unleash a swifter cultural change within your organization.

    In Part 3 of this series I’m going to tackle tool investments and how they can help you achieve DevOps With a Purpose (or stand in the way of it).