devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Category: DOES 2018

  • DOES18 Las Vegas: Video Interviews, Day 2

    DOES18 Las Vegas: Video Interviews, Day 2

    DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018 (DOES18) in Las Vegas was a three-day bonanza of all things DevOps, with conversations spanning the entire DevOps ecosystem, from processes to tools to culture. In my two days at the Broadcast Booth (aka “The Fishbowl”), I had the pleasure of meeting with some very smart people and having some highly insightful conversations, all of which  are available for viewing on DevOpsTV.

    The second day’s conversations at DOES18 were as interesting as the first day’s, with topics ranging from DevOps culture to managing DevOps in highly regulated environments. Below is a recap of the Day 2 video interviews at DOES18 (Day 1’s recap is available for viewing here):

    Organizational Change

    Carmen DeArdo of Tasktop and Jon Smart, formerly of Barclays Group, stopped by to discuss tactics in ways to make change efforts possible in the enterprise.

    Capital One’s DevOps Update

    Jamie Specter, Aimee Bechtle and Abbie Gray of Capital One offered the latest updates from legal, tech leadership and product management in its DevOps journey.

    Work Management Systems

    Scott Prugh of CSG, Keanen Wold of Delta Airlines and Rosalind Radcliffe of IBM discussed how to break down inefficiencies for enterprise practitioners and management leaders who have multiple work management systems that their teams deal with every day.

    Project Management

    Laura Fay of TSIA discussed a product-led growth strategy where the buyer and customer journey is actively engineered into the product experience to deliver value and outcomes. She also explained how DevOps can benefit from expanding the definition of lead time from ’code to cloud’ to ‘concept to customer consumption’ and become a more integrated part of the business value flow.

    The Importance of Culture

    J. Paul Reed of Release Engineering Approaches and Dominica DeGrandis of Tasktop discuss what’s important about culture as part of a DevOps transformation journey, and why a DevOps culture should foster an attitude of open-mindedness, cross-pollination of skills and stepping out of comfort zones.

    DevOps in Regulated Industries

    Robin Yeman of Lockheed Martin and Ken Moser and Melinda Solomon of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services discussed how DevOps can be applied in highly regulated environments and highlighted industry best practices.

    Transformational Leadership – Making Change Happen

    Christophe De Boeck of Kiwibank Ltd. and Steve Mayner of Scaled Agile highlighted considerations for the different ways to lead transformation in large enterprises.

    DevOps Trends – What Does the Future Hold?

    In this forward-looking discussion Eric Robertsonof CollabNet VersionOne, Robert Reeves of Datical and Derek Langone of XebiaLabs chatted about what the future holds for DevOps in the enterprise and what to be on the lookout for in the coming year.

    — Charlene O’Hanlon

  • DOES18 Las Vegas: Video Interviews, Day 1

    DOES18 Las Vegas: Video Interviews, Day 1

    Despite what you may have heard to the contrary, not everything that happens in Vegas should stay there. Take the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018 (DOES18), for example: The three-day event attracted the best and brightest in the DevOps world—and me—to discuss all things DevOps. Some of those great conversations were captured in a series of video interviews, which are now available on DevOps TV.

    During the two days of interviews in our glass-walled video booth, a variety of folks stopped by to chat about topics ranging from audits and compliance to NextGen Ops and the future of DevOps. Below is a recap of the Day 1 video interviews from DOES18 (Day 2’s recap will post next week):

    The Future of DevOps

    Wesley Pullen of Electric Cloud, Torsten Volk of EMA and Chris Nowak of FlowStates stopped by to discuss the latest DevOps trends, where DevOps is headed, and understand key emerging practices and technologies that are driving success.

    Venture Capital and DevOps

    Sid Sijbrandij of GitLab, CJ Napolitano of Electric Cloud and Ubaid Dhiyan of Union Square Advisors chatted about the current state of VC investment into DevOps, how this could evolve in the future and the impact this investment ecosystem has on the global economy.

    ITSM/DevOps Crossover

    IT Skeptic Rob England and his partner Dr. Cherry Vu discussed what holds ITIL back from more successful transformation of IT work, and how we can help it succeed, as DevOps and ITSM finally converge on each other in the common ground of service operations.

    ‘Dear Auditor’ — Compliance and DevOps

    Sam Guckenheimer of Microsoft, James Wickett of Signal Sciences and Topo Pal of Capital One talked about the current state of DevOps and audit/compliance. They are part of a team that wrote a love letter to auditors from DevOps, in which a promise was made to make life better. They also compiled a list of audit concerns and documented them in a DevOps Risk Control Matrix with lot of details around the controls, practices and evidences that are collected to support the control.

    NextGen Ops

    Damon Edwards of Rundeck, Cornelia Davis of Pivotal Software and Tom Limoncelli of Stack Overflow chatted about the next generation of IT Ops and what emerging patterns and practices teams should consider for the future of IT.

    Workplace Burnout

    John Willis (Botchagalupe) is passionate about so many topics around DevOps, cloud and technology. One of the areas he is really passionate about, though, is the topic of burnout and fatigue in the IT field. He and Dr. Christina Maslach discussed the concept of burnout and examined the causes and effects of this problem, and the most promising strategies for dealing effectively with it.

    Project to Product

    Dr. Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop, reviewed the transition from project-based work to product-based workflows—the most optimized and scalable DevOps environment will be a highly prized gem for any business only if the product management team is prioritizing the right capabilities into the DevOps process.

    Tech for Tech Leaders

    Anders Wallgren of Electric Cloud and Erica Morrison of CSG discussed the technology landscape and what things tech leaders need to not only understand from a tech and architecture perspective, but also what they need to know to help build technology and tech platforms for the future of software delivery.

    Banking on DevOps

    Mark Howell of Lloyds Banking Group, Shaun Norris of Standard Chartered Bank and John Rzeszotarski of KeyBank reviewed a few of the top DevOps journeys in banking and what other financial institutions should consider along their DevOps journeys.

    Well, there ya have it: An entire day’s worth of videos compiled for your viewing pleasure. Be sure to check back next week for a recap of our Day 2 video interviews from DOES18 Las Vegas.

    — Charlene O’Hanlon

  • DOES18: Challenges and Enablers for DevOps Success

    DOES18: Challenges and Enablers for DevOps Success

    “What happens in Vegas, doesn”t stay in Vegas” … a great quote to end the recent DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018 (DOES18) in Las Vegas, urging attendees to take and share the new insights and knowledge gained. This article is an attempt at sharing my discoveries.

    This article contains a summary of the challenges that delegates told me about when visiting the GamingWorks stand at the summit. These closely match our global findings, with more than 400 teams having participated in the Phoenix Project business simulation workshop.

    This article also describes highlights from the sessions I had time to attend—highlights mostly in relation to the challenges mentioned above, and biased toward toward people, culture and behavior, as this to me is the No. 1 success or fail factor for the successful adoption of DevOps ways of working.

    Challenges

    I asked more than 100 people, “What is your top challenge or barrier for your adoption of DevOps ways of working?” I have ordered them based upon the number of times mentioned, highest first. Many of these I captured before the opening of the summit:

    Leadership:

    • Leaders applying the “pointy-fingered” approach. “You are now self-empowered. Make IT happen.‘
    • Lack of “empowerment” and not “walking-the-talk” to foster the right culture.
    • Not wanting to let go of a “command and control” management approach and fear of becoming less relevant.

    Product Management:

    • The need to shift from a “feature” focus to more “outcome” and “business value” focus.
    • Product owners “demand” but don”t share why.
    • Low focus on “technical debt” and “issues” versus “benefits.”
    • Need higher-level product management (business decision makers) to balance “innovation” with “risks” (e.g technical debt).

    Value Stream:

    • Poor end-to-end visibility (including business “before” and “after” activities).
    • A narrow focus on Dev and Ops, mostly a Dev “pipeline.”
    • No impediment backlog visible for the stream.
    • Too much local optimization.

    Value and Metrics:

    • Too much focus on internal, proxy metrics.
    • Need more “value” and “outcome” metrics to gain buy-in to scale up.

    End-to-End Communication and Team Collaboration:

    • “Them” and “Us” – lack of trust.
    • Poor listening and communication skills to explore and understand.
    • Lack of end-to-end understanding of the business impact and value we are all working toward.

    Poor Management of WIP:

    • Poor balance between types of work, feature vs technical debt, improvements, training and knowledge-sharing.
    • Engineer disconnect between “what you are working on and the business impact.”

    Continual Learning and Improvement:

    • Not enough WIP reserved.
    • Poor team ownership and ability to structure this.
    • No visible backlog of impediments/improvement.
    • No prioritization of improvements.

    Project to Product:

    • Projects claiming resources.
    • Product owner resource conflicts and challenges.
    • Flip-flopping, context switching work.

    Buy-in and Resistance:

    • Why should we change?
    • Fear, uncertainty, doubt.
    • Suspicion of intentions.
    • Managers not wanting to change and lose “power.”

    Certainly not a lot of CI/CD or technology stuff mentioned here!

    What were some of my highlights as they relate to these challenges?

    DOES18: Introduction and Opening

    In his introduction, Gene Kim revealed one of the goals of the summit was a need to “Elevate focus on spanning business/technology divide,” which clearly relates to a high-scoring challenge. Another topic in the intro was the need to “upskill,” announcing a new skills research project to be launched. The challenges above and the highlights from the sessions give a clear indication of some of the skills needed. Considering the challenges above, I sincerely hope the survey also focuses on business skills as well. In the “Lean Coffee” roundtable sessions, one of the announced topics was “Transformational Leadership,” clearly linking to the top scoring challenges mentioned. More about this topic in my closing.

    DOES18 Sessions

    In a session titled, “Product Management Meets DevOps” a key recommendation was to “build and run teams combined with service ownership,” stressing a need “to connect people to your strategy” and declaring “IT cannot be separate from the business,” and finishing with a need to “manage product value streams, not projects.”  (This was the only session in which I heard the word “service”). To me, these highlights clearly make a link back to the challenge teams have in understanding business impact and value. These recommendations will require a changing role for product management to ensure strategic priorities are embedded in the value stream, and a more engaged role of product owners in teams to ensure a shared understanding and focus on “outcomes” and “value” in relation to strategy, rather than on features.

    Benefit: Enabling the flow of strategic intent

    Mark Schwartz explained that almost all large enterprises are faced with “impediments” that are a barrier to DevOps success, and these are usually people and organizational issues, not technology. He introduced his new “War and Peace and IT” book, and explained an impediment faced by Napoleon in his Russian campaign—Napoleon had “long decision cycles.” By the time he got the right information to make a strategic decision, the fast-changing short decision cycles at the battlefield meant his decision-making was ineffective. The same applies to the way we currently manage IT: long decision-making cycles from idea to business case to program and project resourcing while DevOps teams operate at a fast, agile pace. Mark suggested a need to speed up the “entire lead time from idea to impact” (a topic also explored in Mark Smalley’s latest DASA whitepaper, “The Business Value of DevOps“).

    Benefit: Enabling the faster flow of strategic intent

    Schwartz went on to suggest three ways to build more agility into the end-to-end value stream and delegate decision-making to a lower level: the “product model,” decentralizing decision to the product team; the “budget model,” decentralizing budget to the team to manage both “innovation” and “keeping the lights on”; and the “objective model,” just give the team the key objectives to be achieved and let them decide how to make it happen anyway they can.

    This to me represents a considerable mindset shift from the hierarchical “command and control” management paradigm and requires transformational leadership. In my mind, whatever model is chosen needs to fit with the highlight from the previous session, “Connect people to your strategy.”

    Benefit: Enabling faster decision-making around strategic intent

    Anders Wallgren‘s session, “Measuring DevOps – The Key Metrics That Matter” was standing room only, with a packed audience taking pictures of all of the slides. I must admit to being surprised, as this is the fifth DOES conference and organizations have had five years to put metrics in place! I can only assume the vast majority were just starting their journey. I was pleased to see not just the traditional metrics often quoted such as “deployment frequency,” “lead time to change,” “mean time to recover (MTTR),” and “change failure rate,” but also business value metrics such as revenue growth; customer value metrics such as customer experience satisfaction; team culture metrics such as education and growth; and the pipeline metrics such as release velocity. This was one of the top-scoring challenges facing delegates who visited our table: “Fhifting from internal metrics to business value metrics.” This focus on business value metrics ties in again to the highlight from the first session above, “Connect people to the strategy,” and the important role product owners have in sharing the strategic intent.

    Benefit: Enabling measurement of strategic intent.

    Dr. Mik Kersten presented “Project to Product: How Value Steam Networks will transform IT and the Business,” suggesting that project management and traditional cost models are the wrong models, an idea supporting Mark Schwartz’s observations. He went on to add, “Fragmented value streams kill personal productivity,” as well as “impact employee satisfaction.” Silos and proxy metrics not related to business value will also destroy a DevOps transformation. He made some powerful arguments for a complete end-to-end value stream (Not just a DevOps value stream).

    These messages were further endorsed by Carmen De Ardo in his session, “Connecting IT to the Business at BMW Group,” during which he also stressed, “Flow time is not just code-to-commit but also, and more importantly, idea-to-value.” Carmen also stressed that the “flow to value” is not just the flow of “features” but also “defects,” “risks” and “debts,” which to me represents a need to manage “value optimization,” a balance of “value creation” and a reduction of “value leakage.”

    Benefit: Enabling value optimization of strategic intent.

    Damon Edwards, in his session “Operations: The Last Mile,” expanded on the theme of end-to-end value streams, with a powerful case about disruption, context switching, waiting, escalations, lack of trust and employee dissatisfaction—all this because of “four forces that undermine operations” that need to be addressed to empower operations:

    • Reduction of Toil—non-valued repetitive work that can be automated.
    • Queues, which disintegrate and obfuscate value streams.
    • Silos, causing disconnects and mismatches.
    • Low trust—the need for “psychological safety, the No. 1 predicate for success.”

    Benefit: Enabling the removal of behavioral flow barriers and waste.  

    Dominca Degrandis in her session, “Making Connections Visible: How to Defrag Your Value Stream,” stressed, “The hardest thing we do is communicate across teams,” making a call to make connections visible as well as “how the different types of work enters the system, where they enter and which tools are used.” This touched on a topic I discussed with DeArdo at itSMF Fusion: the information value stream.

    Benefit: Enabling the removal of end-to-end information and behavioral flow barriers and waste.

    One of the most powerful sessions for me was the presentation from Dr. Steve Spear: “Discovering Your Way to Greatness: How Finding and Fixing Faults is the Path to Perfection.” He suggested, “Design all work to SEE problems.” Make this part of a philosophy: “See, Solve, Spread (Share knowledge).” He suggested, don’t ask “How is it going?” Ask, “What is not working, and what can we do about it?” This ties in nicely with a finding from the latest State Of DevOps report: “Relentless improvement work leads to excellence and high performance.”

    Benefit: Enabling the relentless removal of barriers and waste and the optimization of strategic intent.

    DOES18: A Customer Case

    Mascha Boender  and Stefan Groot presented an ABN AMRO case, “Crossing the DevOps Chasm: From Taboo to Enterprise DevOps,” in which they discussed their bottom-up journey of experimentation. They designed their approaches to see problems. They admitted failure, demonstrating their learning and how they made iterative improvements. They stepped away from a maturity model to a capability model, recognizing that one size doesn’t fit all teams. They provided a “Moonshot workshop,” focusing on specific team goals and ambitions and how these aligned to business strategic goals. They provided a DevOps playbook (based on captured team best practices) to help new teams develop practices at their own pace. To develop team “soft skills” such as communication and collaboration, they used the Phoenix Project business simulation workshop. This was done also with more than 30 leaders to create a mindset shift and demonstrate the change of leadership behaviors required to empower the teams and foster an enterprisewide culture change.

    Benefit: Enabling bottom-up and top-down “skills” and “culture” and aligning team goals to strategic intent.

    The State Of DevOps

    Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble presented, “The Data Behind DevOps: Becoming a High Performer,” in which they shared findings from the latest “State Of DevOps” report. I won’t go into detail. I suggest you read the report, then read it again. Suffice to say their key messaging echoed many of the other sessions above: “Focus on outcomes, not output,” the need to “identify constraints and continually improve,” and for me an important topic: “Influencing culture through leadership and autonomy.”

    The ABN case above was an example of how they gave teams autonomy to change and  how they helped change leadership behaviors.

    DOES18: Final Thoughts

    As I stated at the start, culture to me is the No. 1 success or fail factor. The “State of DevOps” report stressed the importance of leadership on culture. Leadership was the top challenge mentioned by delegates visiting our stand. I”d like to share with you an article on devopsy.kinsta.cloud on how to influence leadership behaviors: The article is written through the lens of “communication,” tying back to a comment from Dominica Degrandis: “The hardest thing we do is communicate across teams,” and tying in with the ABN AMRO case about developing communication and collaboration skills.

    And finally, getting back to the start of the summit and the need to “upskill,” with the announcement of a skills survey, I’d like to provide some input. Here is a DevOps Agile Skills Association (DASA) article, “DASA Provides Core Skills Key for DevOps Success,” which summarizes the “people and culture” elements from the “State of DevOps” report (this year and previous years) matching these with findings from more than 400 teams having participated in the Phoenix Project DevOps simulation. This I believe can provide input into the survey.

    — Paul Wilkinson

  • DOES 2018: DevOps Providing Greater Business Outcomes, Yet Challenges Remain

    DOES 2018: DevOps Providing Greater Business Outcomes, Yet Challenges Remain

    The DevOps Enterprise Summit turned 4 years old this year, and what a difference four years makes: At the inaugural summit, perhaps a few hundred attendees participated. This year, there were roughly 2,000, according to the organizers.

    The energy at the first year’s event felt like that of a skunkworks team that knew they were on to a great new way—they only had to sell the rest of the world on their radical ideas. This year, it became clear that the battle of ideas is over: The DevOps evangelists have won, and DevOps is here to stay.

    According to a DBmaestro study, more than 80 percent of organizations have adopted DevOps to some degree, but only 30 percent have done so across their entire organization. That study shows the popularity of DevOps, but also that there’s much more work to be done.

    That state of work was reflected at this year’s DevOps Enterprise Summit. This year the focus was on improving the pipelines that have been built, pushing the limits of DevOps even further and learning how to cope with the limitations of legacy business-technology systems that refuse yet to be retired.

    Greater Focus on Business Outcomes

    It seems DevOps has arrived. As Scott Prugh, chief architect and VP software development at CSG, said during his DevOps Enterprise Summit talk, “Product Management Meets DevOps,” it’s about business leaders from across the organization coming together to deliver better outcomes.

    That’s an aspect of DevOps that stood out boldly this year. DevOps practices in the enterprise are starting to move beyond the common cloud-native toolsets and are being applied to other areas in the organization, from the cloud back to mainframe and many systems in between.

    This unleashing of systems detached from the typical DevOps workflows turned out to be a central theme of the summit. For instance, Eric Robertson, VP product marketing management at CollabNet, explained how customers are exposing services on their mainframes and enterprise resource planning systems. As a result, customers are better able to deliver capability and value without having to re-create and re-release services.

    “It’s about knocking down the silos and optimizing functionality around business value,” said Sam Fell, VP of marketing at Electric Cloud. Those who aren’t doing it right, he said, are those who are not aligned well enough to provide the best business outcomes, the right user experience or the most optimal architecture, security and performance necessary to succeed in creating those user experiences.

    “You need to take a multidimensional approach and put the right people in the room early enough so that the right focus is maintained on outcomes,” said Anders Wallgren, CTO at Electric Cloud, during the DevOps Enterprise Summit.

    Both Fell and Wallgren agreed that more organizations have embraced the kind of architectures necessary to support the agility necessary to succeed. This includes container architectures that can be changed rapidly and safely so that in the event errors are introduced, systems can be remediated quickly.

    Challenges Remain

    In his talk, “DevOps for the Enterprise: 2018 Trends and Insights,” Wesley Pullen, chief strategy officer at Electric Cloud, detailed how enterprises are working to manage IT complexity. According to findings he shared from 451 Research, enterprises are taking a hybrid approach to cloud and container adoption, with 81 percent of organizations adopting a multi-cloud strategy, 58 percent adopting containers and 48 percent traditional on-premises systems. “What we have today are multiple teams working on independent and interdependent systems and target platforms with overlapping tools, platforms and release cadences. Managing all of this effectively is a challenge,” he said.

    One area where these challenges show themselves is with security. According to the “Sonatype2018 State of Software Supply Chain” study, since the Equifax data breach in 2017, there has been a 55 percent increase in open source breaches and 1 million downloads of vulnerable open source libraries. Fortunately, more organizations are embracing DevSecOps and making sure security processes are integrated into their DevOps processes, Pullen said.

    When it comes to extracting value from their existing enterprise systems, Pullen noted more organizations are making self-service catalogs available to their teams so that if a service is needed and it’s already been built, teams can access these resources quickly.

    Finally, he said more organizations are applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to their development pipelines. About one-third of organizations are making machine learning a top investment priority. They are using the technology to identify patterns using in-depth statistical analysis, predict future risk using previous patterns and provide recommendations to reduce risk, he said.

    While DevOps has outgrown its skunkworks roots, this year’s DevOps Enterprise Summit made it clear there is still much more work to be done before most DevOps organizations reach their full potential.

    — George V. Hulme

  • DevOps Enterprise Summit: Las Vegas 2018: A Sneak Peek

    DevOps Enterprise Summit: Las Vegas 2018: A Sneak Peek

    Wow! It’s hard to believe that just a few months ago, we were wrapping up two days of immersive learning at the DevOps Enterprise Summit London event, and now we are getting ready for our biggest DevOps Enterprise event ever — Las Vegas 2018!

    In this post, I describe the programming objectives for the 2018 DevOps Enterprise Las Vegas event—what our most important focus areas are, how it differs from previous years, and why certain elements remain the same. I shared this with our programming committee early in our planning process, so that we could scrutinize and critique it. As someone once famously noted, “To be able to think clearly, one usually needs to first write it clearly.”

    Our first objective is to have the 2018 Las Vegas event be even better than our 2018 London event, which in turn, I believe, was even better than our 2017 San Francisco event, which was the better than all of our previous events. Aiming to have the next conference to be better than the last is challenging, especially when you think that your last event was the best yet—but without a doubt, stating this as an explicit objectives makes it impossible just to coast.

    But, the good news is, there are plenty of challenges this community faces, and I have confidence that by helping the community overcome those challenges, the result is a better conference.  And I think you’re going to love what we have in store for you!

    (And with that in mind, I hope that when you see this year’s conference speaker lineup, you’ll agree that this will be the best DevOps Enterprise Summit yet — if you haven’t registered yet, please use the special code below to save $300 off your registration price!)

    Here are the other programming objectives for 2018, created with the fantastic Programming Committee:

    Our Programming Objectives:

    • Get great experience reports, and repeat experience reports
    • Elevate focus on Spanning Business/Technology Divide
    • Elevate focus on Next Generation Ops and Infrastructure
    • Ensure conference structure helps attendees achieve their goals
    • Get best subject matter experts from the domains we need

    Great Experience Reports (And Repeat Experience Reports)

    For the past four years, one of the hallmarks of DevOps Enterprise Summit is that we have many repeat speakers presenting their ongoing DevOps transformation experience reports. This has been an awesome way to document their journeys and progress over time—it is especially gratifying to see how their areas of responsibility keep growing. Repeat experience reports make up 15 percent of our programming.

    • Chad Avery, Program Manager, DevOps; Aimee Cardwell, VP, Consumer Product Development – American Express
    • Ross Clanton, Executive Director, Technology Modernization – Verizon
    • Pauly Comtois, VP DevOps – Hearst Business Media
    • Jim Grafmeyer, Director, IT Infrastructure; Jared Speno, Senior Technical Consultant – Nationwide
    • Chris Hill, Head of Systems Engineering – Jaguar Land Rover
    • Olivier Jacques, Principal, DevOps transformation; Joan Watson, Dir. DevSecOps – DXC Technology
    • Bryan Finster, Staff Software Engineer; Dana Finster, Sr. Software Engineer – Walmart

    One potential danger of having repeat speakers is the self-reinforcing loop and creating a self-contained echo chamber, merely repeating what we like hearing.  That’s why we continue to seek out new experience reports—new experience reports are 25 percent of our programming.

    In these new experience reports, we actively seek the largest and most recognized firms across every industry vertical, to give DevOps Enterprise champions more case studies and empirical evidence to make their case internally, and overcome objections.

    I’m delighted that over the years, we’ve had some of the world’s largest banks present, as well as large not-for-profits, government agencies, and military branches—organizations that are often views as risk-averse and conservative.  For these stories, we are interested in organizations at all stages of the journey.  And these stories are a source of fantastic and serendipitous discoveries, as well.

    I’m delighted that this year, we have new speakers:

    • Dan Barker, Chief Architect – National Association of Insurance Commissioners
    • Ann Corrao, Distinguished Engineer and Master Inventor – IBM
    • Scott Havens, Director of Software Engineering – Jet.com and Walmart Labs
    • Simmons Lough, IT Specialist – US Patent & Trademark
    • Keanen Wold, Manager, DevOps Transformation  – Delta Airlines

    Spanning the Business and Technology Divide

    Another goal is to help the community get business leadership onboard—and by that, I don’t mean business leadership silently tolerating DevOps.  Instead, what we are looking for are enthusiastic and grateful business partners, who want to tell the world how all their goals, dreams and aspirations were finally achieved by working together with their technology counterpart.  In London 2018, we had some fantastic talks along these lines (from Nike, Capital One, and Verizon Enterprise).

    In Las Vegas, we’ll be featuring even more talks like this, showing how technology leaders are partnering with not just business leaders, but also other areas of the business, such as product leadership, security/privacy, legal, project management and so forth.

    These unique types of experience reports will represent about 15% of our overall talks, and I’m super-excited about their stories—these are the most difficult talks to find, because they require a technology leader with a great working relationship their business counterpart, and that they’ve created visible successes.

    • Courtney Kissler, Vice President, Nike Digital Platform Engineering – Nike; Ann Bradley, Chief Privacy Officer and Global Counsel – Nike Direct
    • Aimee Bechtle, Senior Manager Advanced Engineering; Abbie Gray, Product Manager in Credit Card Channels Product & Platform – Capital One
    • Levi Geinert, Director of Engineering; Lucas Rettig, Principal Product Owner; Dan Cundiff, Principal Engineer – Target
    • Topo Pal, Senior Director & Sr. Engineering Fellow;  Jamie Specter, Counsel, IP & Technology Legal Group – Capital One
    • Jason Cox, Director, Systems Engineering; Deepti Mutnuru, Senior Project Manager – The Walt Disney Company
    • Alice Raia, Vice President, Digital Presence Technologies; Le Quach, Director, Strategic Design & Implementation – Kaiser Permanente

    Next Generation Ops and Infrastructure

    I’ve written before about how this programming objective came from Jason Cox at Disney (one of our programming committee members), who said to me every year, “Great conference for Dev, but it wasn’t as great for Ops.”

    In 2018, we finally did something about it: Starting in London 2018, we reserved 25 percent of talks for next generation Ops and Infrastructure concerns, and created a separate subcommittee to focus on this area.

    And wow, we were all very, very happy with the results—in fact, I think the elevation of this topic has fundamentally changed the feel of the conference (you can watch a full discussion about this track here). In this track, we really make an effort to help define and clarify what exactly the role of Ops leader is, all the technology and organizational changes there have been in how infrastructure is designed, delivered and operated.

    This year, we are dedicating about 25 percent of the programming to this topic, and we are preserving that proportion for the main stage presentations, as well. I love that these presentations are also a bit more technical, but there’s no doubt that it is extremely relevant for the technology leadership community. (After all, as Mark Schwartz famously observed, “Last I heard, this is still a technical field.”  Haha!)

    Examples of talks in this track include:

    • Jeffrey Snover, Technical Fellow and Chief Architect for Azure Storage & Cloud Edge – Microsoft
    • John Rzeszotarski, SVP, Director of Continuous Delivery and Feedback – KeyBank
    • Cornelia Davis, Senior Director of Technology – Pivotal
    • Damon Edwards, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer- Rundeck
    • Tom Limoncelli, Renowned Author and Speaker, Former Sys Admin for Google, currently SRE Manager – Stack Overflow
    • Shaun Norris, Global Head, Cloud Infrastructure Services – Standard Chartered Bank
    • Charity Majors, former Production Engineering Manager for Facebook, currently CEO, Engineer and Co-founder – Honeycomb.io.

    BONUS – if you haven’t seen the Next Gen Ops panel discussion from the June conference in London, it’s worth a watch here.

    Subject Experts from Areas We Draw Upon

    In our San Francisco 2017 conference, one of the most notable (and for me, memorable) moments was the Safety Culture and Lean Panel we had, featuring three luminaries in the field.  Dr. Sidney Dekker and Dr. Richard Cook (Safety Culture) and Dr. Steven Spear (Lean) and I discussed the areas of mutual reinforcing principles from those two fields, and discussed how lessons learned from those domains could be applied to the DevOps Enterprise community.

    This year, we are honored to have Dr. Christina Maslach speak on her lifetime of research on burnout. She is professor emerita of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and her area of research focus includes: burnout and job stress; and individuation and social influence, as well as the positive antithesis of burnout, work engagement, as a better framework for developing interventions.

    My mentor, Dr. Steven Spear, will be presenting as well.  He presented at DevOps Enterprise Summit in 2015, and was part of the panel I mentioned above.  He is currently Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Dr. Spear is a Senior Fellow for the Institute of Healthcare Improvement, and was a four-time recipient of the Shingo Prize for Research Excellence. He is the author of “The High Velocity Edge,” and has extended his research beyond manufacturing to R&D, workplace safety, health care, etc.

    (Stay tuned for some exciting news that we’ll be able to share about something else special we have planned!)

    Twenty percent of our programming is dedicated to these types of talks—Dr. Nicole Forsgren (founder and CEO of DevOps Research and Assessment) will be presenting the “2018 Accelerate State of DevOps Findings,” which was done with the help of Google Cloud. Rosalind Radcliffe (Distinguished Engineer, Chief Architect for DevOps for z Systems IBM) will be presenting on her work elevating the state of the practice for the mainframe ecosystem.  And many more!

    Networking and Community Activities

    When I look at the DevOps Enterprise community, it is a community of networkers. I see lasting collaborations and friendships that have lasted for years and the mark of a phenomenal community is one that is actively helping one another. With that desired outcome in mind, we have made some changes to our programming.

    • New – DevOps Confessions! This came about some advice from Dr. Richard Cook who made the observation that the stories presented on stage are the heroic triumph stories, but stories that come out over evening drinks are those about the struggles and failures and near-misses. To bridge that gap, we’re going to set aside 15 minutes every morning where I will read two anonymized stories of confessions from leaders in the DevOps community. Hear more about this project here.

    Furthermore, there will be an hour per day in the programming where there are no talks — instead, this is a time for networking and collaboration and information sharing, with various levels of structure. (Our observation was that formats such as Lean Coffee were extremely popular, but because they were scheduled at the same time as talks, people went to the talks instead because of the “Fear of Missing Out”.  So, now there are no talks to compete with!)

    • Ask the Speakers! If you have questions for our speakers, we’re creating dedicated times for you to meet with them and ask the questions that will dig deeper into what your interests are. We’ll also open up a Slack channel for every attendee to use and submit questions directly to speakers and to other attendees.
    • Lean Coffee Sessions! We want to help attendees connect with and learn from their peers at the conference in another semi-structured format as well. We’re going to produce Lean Coffee sessions, led by Dominica DeGrandis, both days of the conference. This will be comprised of 10 tables big enough for 10 people to talk about similar interests that are relevant to the theme at the table. Hopefully, this provides another opportunity to learn a lot and make some valuable new connections.
    • Birds of a Feather Sessions!  These are more like the DevOpsDays unconference sessions, with less structure than a Lean Coffee format, driven by specific topics that attendees want to discuss and learn about.

    We also will have…

    • Slack Workspace! We will have our very own Slack workspace for the DevOps Enterprise Summit! You’ll be able to join the channel to take part in the conversation, as well as a “Who’s Hiring?” channel to learn about potential opportunities in the space. These channels will stay open after the conference ends to keep the dialogue rolling!
    • Lunch time! There will be a few different lunch options that attendees can take advantage of as well:
      •  Eat lunch with a speaker will be a first come, first serve basis. During these sessions, you will have opportunities to sit down face-to-face with a speaker and again, dive deeper into the subject matter of their presentation and experiences in a more personal setting.
      • Have lunch with fellow attendees at high top tables around the buffet stations where there are pre-written note cards to serve as seed questions for discussion.
    • Industry party! Every good conference comes with a good party, and DOES18 Las Vegas will be no different! Thanks to our friends at Delphix, the industry party is happening on Monday evening following Day 1. We’ll have sponsor giveaways, food, drinks, and another great opportunity to continue conversations with fellow attendees and speakers. I’ve found this time proves to nurture some of the best networking and listening to some amazing stories from in the trenches!

    This year at DOES18 Las Vegas, we’ll also be having Lightning Talks and the IT Revolution Author Book Signing! These will be on Day 2, following closing remarks. There will be refreshments and happy hour snacks as well!

      • Lightning Talks! Presented by our friends at Sonatype, these talks happen from 6:30-7:30 p.m. in Chelsea. These are rapid fire, must-see presentations – just watch the Lightning Talks from 2017 to see what I mean. More information forthcoming about these talks soon and if you’re attending, be on the lookout for the call for presentations as well!
      • IT Revolution Author Book Signing! From 7:15-8 p.m. in the Chelsea Balcony. We are excited to debut the latest title from IT Revolution Press and author Dr. Mik Kersten, “Project to Product,” at the IT Revolution book signing on Tuesday night! I believe this will be a very important book for our generation of technology leaders—the majority of economic value will be created when the largest brands across every industry vertical adopts the better ways of working pioneered by the FANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google), of which the DevOps Enterprise community is leading the charge. Mik’s book describes how project management and other orthodoxies need to be replaced with product-oriented cultures and management paradigms.

    As you can see, there’s a lot that is getting me excited for the conference this year! We hope we will see you at what is sure to be the best DevOps Enterprise Summit yet! Register now (and book your room at the Cosmopolitan) to ensure your spot at DOES 18 Las Vegas!

    — Gene Kim

  • Continuous Discussions, Episode 90: Gene Kim and DOES18 Speakers

    Continuous Discussions, Episode 90: Gene Kim and DOES18 Speakers

    In a recent episode of the Continuous Discussions (#c9d9) podcast, we hosted Gene Kim and several speakers from the upcoming DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas (DOES18) conference. We’re proud Founding Partners of the event and always enjoy having IT thought leaders join us ahead of the show to talk about DevOps, the conference program and more. In this episode, we discussed an emerging conference theme of next-gen operations and infrastructure.

    The panel of DOES18 speakers included: Cornelia Davis, senior director of technology at Pivotal; Damon Edwards, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Rundeck; Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop; Tom Limoncelli, SRE at StackOverflow.com; Gene Kim, founder of IT Revolution and co-author of “The DevOps Handbook,” “The Phoenix Project” and “Accelerate”; and Electric Cloud’s Sam Fell and Anders Wallgren.

    Continue reading for some of the top takeaways from the discussion!

    Next-Generation Operations: Programming and Insights

    As we continue to evolve, the best is yet to come for operations teams, per Kim: “If we follow the course of what the development languages and development frameworks have done for development productivity, and extend that to operations, I think the best time for operations and infrastructure and platforms are to come.”

    Davis encouraged operations teams to treat their platform like a product instead of infrastructure: “When I speak with the IT operations folks, they’re still largely short order cooks. They’re very reactive, doing things that people need them to do. It’s about being able to apply some of the same principles of continuous delivery to the way that you do ops. At the core of that is this philosophical notion, which is to treat platform just like you treat any other product.”

    The way enterprise operations teams do work is unique, per Edwards: “For enterprise operations, you have to fundamentally rethink the conventional wisdom of how you think about, approach and do operations work. DevOps Enterprise Summit started in the early days of the DevOps explosion. This is distinctly an enterprise discussion because it’s all about that history of success that we have to account for.”

    Kersten on the different ways development and operations teams measure outcomes: “I so often see the development side of the organization and the infrastructure operations side collecting completely different metrics and telemetry. The development side uses the more familiar telemetry that comes from DevOps. And the operations side is still in a burnup, burndown world. There are no common metrics or languages for what really should be an internal value stream.”

    Great operations management advice from Limoncelli: “Get one team to do it well, and let people copy that success. And do it in a way that creates cultural minimums or cultural ways of doing things, so that people are competing to make things better instead of being told you have to make this change.”

    Moving away from legacy operations is a dauting challenge especially for the enterprise, explained Wallgren: “The things that we refer to as legacy are the things that keep the lights on and bring the money in. It’s a big leap to move away from that and it’s going to take a lot of work and quite a lot of time. It’s like changing the engine and tires on a car while you’re driving down the highway at speed.”

    Functional Programming, SREs and More Musings

    Davis on functional programming, something she will be talking in-depth about at DOES18: “Treating function as a first-class citizen is absolutely essential because you start to create these functions very dynamically, and the functions now encapsulate the state. So instead of having state and then having side effects against a state, what we have are these functions encapsulating a sequence of changes that are going to generate a state.”

    Kim described an “aha” moment he had during Davis’ talk at DOES18 London about sidecars in Kubernetes: “The ability to liberate developers and address cross-cutting concerns like logging was one of the primary impetuses why people flocked to Spring from orthodox frameworks that were so unsatisfying. And that was, for me, that was one of the biggest aha moments of the conference.”

    Edwards discussed the implications of toil work and how to spend more time doing things of value: “Toil work is work that we should have automated, it’s repeatable, and not adding enduring value to what we’re doing. Versus work that requires human ingenuity, the engineering work that adds enduring value to our organization. Set a limit as an organization to not accept more than 50 percent of time being consumed by toil and figure out how to help those organizations where they have too much toil and not enough engineering work.”

    Most organizations don’t have $2.5 billion in their back pocket to build a product-oriented value stream, but Kersten said we should take a page from their book: “This is a testament to how invested the tech giants are in their own platform as products. If we don’t at least adopt their thinking around having this connected end to end platform that supports all your products and value streams, you’re just not on the right path.”

    Limoncelli on the ability of SRE’s to reach across silos: “In the SRE model, you can reach across silos. I like to think of it as you have the CICD pipeline and the SRE’s stand at the end of the pipeline asking, ‘What are the operational problems that we’re having? What’s the constraint? What’s the bottleneck?’ They fix that by asking how they can collaborate with the other team within our organization. And either sit with them for a week and fix it or collaborate with them to fix the problem.”

    Wallgren elaborated on treating pipelines as code: “Treating your pipeline as code is something we’ve been evangelizing. And really, that should be the first thing that you really worry about in some sense, because you’re not going to ship anything unless you have a pipeline.”

    The DOES18 Las Vegas agenda is now live! Check out the sessions from Davis, Edwards, Kersten, Limoncelli, Wallgren and dozens more. Tickets to DOES18 are running low, so be sure to register before it’s too late.

    Watch the full episode:

    — Anders Wallgren

  • DevOps TV: DOES18 London Video Panel Roundup

    DevOps TV: DOES18 London Video Panel Roundup

    The DevOps Enterprise Summit is one of my favorite places to connect with the world’s best technologists and DevOps practitioners. It’s the perfect forum for insightful conversations, valuable networking and immersive learning—and the comraderie is unmatched. For me, it’s always a pleasure to catch up with my great friends in DevOps and get an insider’s perspective from the leaders who are driving the industry and practices forward.

    This past June, DevOps Enterprise Summit London (DOES18) did not disappoint. We experienced firsthand some of the most iconic business transformation stories in DevOps. We also heard from the best technologists in the business. The programming committee introduced new themes and brought in fresh perspectives that reach beyond Dev and Ops. We got to see how the technology value stream influences the entire business from the standpoint of those impacted the most.

    Once again, devopsy.kinsta.cloud partnered with IT Revolution and DOES18 organizers for in-depth video panel conversations with the speakers and thought leaders. Next-generation ops and infrastructure, spanning the divide between tech and business, DevSecOps and experience reports were all topics of conversation at this year’s show. We talked about challenges, opportunities and what the future is going to look like for DevOps. Here are the highlights from the videos we shared on DevOps TV.

    Where are They Now?

    One of the things I look forward to most at DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES) is reconnecting with leaders who have shared their DevOps journeys and experiences from the early days. These companies can act as the compass for those that are just starting IT transformation journeys. At DOES, we learn where these industry pioneers are headed, the ups, the downs and what they are working on/need help with next. For example, we continued the conversation with Jonathan Fletcher at Hiscox, whose DevOps journey has been incredible to follow. The Verizon team, who presented on Day, 2 sat down with me and talked about the long lasting effects their DevOps transformation has had on such an extremely large and already successful company. Last, but not least, representatives Capital One chronicled their DevOps transformation journey and their march toward high performing teams across the organization.

    DevOps Right Now

    If you want the scoop on where DevOps stands today, DOES is the place to be. I enjoyed the conversation I had with DevOps thought leader and author, Mirco Hering, who shared invaluable knowledge on the current state of DevOps. We also sat down with Ilkka Turunen, Zane Lackey and Margo Cronin to take a deep dive into one of today’s hottest topics: DevSecOps. Examining value streams of high performing companies was also top of mind and it was interesting to hear how adjusting that value depended on the changing needs of the customer. Nicole Bryan, Carmen DeArdo, Dominica DeGrandis, Mik Kersten and I had an insightful discussion about this topic.

    ITSM and DevOps Can Be Friends

    Whether you were a skeptic of ITSM or DevOps in the early years, it’s likely you didn’t predict that they would be compatible. We had a great conversation with the fantastic Jayne Groll, Rob England and Dr. Cherry Vu around ITSM, ITIL and DevOps—and how DevOps and ITSM can actually complement each other.

    Next Gen Operations and Infrastructure

    Gene Kim and the programming committee worked hard to make next-generation ops and infrastructure a big theme at this year’s conference by seeking some of the sharpest talents in this arena. We had the amazing opportunity to interview John Willis, Damon Edwards and Cornelia Davis to talk about where ops is headed.

    Spanning the Tech and Business Divide

    As I mentioned earlier, DOES18 examines how the technology value stream goes far beyond just Dev and Ops. We looked at its impact on HR, project management and more—and how DevOps applies to leadership these other areas of the organization. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Fin Goulding, Jelena Laketic and Mark Schwartz to discuss the role that IT leaders should play in a successful DevOps transformation and what things are of value when injecting high performance into a company. I also reflected on the different business organization strategies used to turn normal companies into high performers and common problems that can be overcome on that journey with Jon Smart, Morag McCall and Tom Clark.

    Competitiveness and DevOps

    If your organization isn’t constantly adapting to out compete the competition, regardless of whether you are practicing DevOps, you may have already lost. Jennifer Wood and Chris Hill stopped by to discuss the need for companies struggling to compete in their industries to adopt DevOps practices. We also got to get a glimpse into their own company’s transformation efforts as well. One industry in particular that is facing disruption is financial services. I was lucky enough to sit down with two high-profile finance based IT leaders, Shaun Norris and Nick Funnel, to engage in a discussion on the evolution of DevOps in their industry and the direction of DevOps in the future as technology continues to evolve for finance.

    Las Vegas is Around the Corner

    There are plenty more videos to check out on DevOps TV from DOES18 London and recordings of the onstage presentations at the conference as well. You can also view the PowerPoint slides here.

    I look forward to connecting with all my DevOps friends again at DOES18 USA in Las Vegas this October!

    — Alan Shimel

  • DOES UK: Nike Applies ‘Just Do It’ Attitude to DevOps

    DOES UK: Nike Applies ‘Just Do It’ Attitude to DevOps

    Nike’s DevOps transformation has had a lasting impact on its culture and productivity, while allowing the company to connect with its customer in ways it never could before. Its journey down the path to DevOps was shared at the DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES UK) 2018,  in London.

    For a company of its size and success in the current market to take a giant leap of faith and come out even more successful takes incredible courage, hard work and collaboration. But that’s Nike for you: Shoes, apparel or DevOps—it doesn’t make a difference to the company. From day 1, Nike has lived its mantra, “Just Do It!”

    Imagine this: You’re a high-level IT employee at a non-technology-focused company with a market value of just over $110 billion. All of a sudden, the newly appointed CEO makes the most significant announcement in recent history of the company, essentially saying, “We are entering a new era of growth and we expect to use technology as our main way of getting closer to the customer.” Pretty crazy, huh?

    This was reality for Randy Lyons, a longtime employee at Nike with an extremely strong taste for competition and the opportunity of a lifetime in his hands. Based in the EMEA region, Lyons teamed with global Nike CFO Michelle Power with one goal in mind: to bring customers closer to the products, available at any of their 7,000 branded stores globally, through a digital platform. The aim was to tap into consumers’ need to check our phones before making a purchase. The scale was momentous; arguably, larger than any other company achieving a successful DevOps or Agile transformation before. To pull this off on the scale CEO Mark Parker had intended, a complete culture shift was necessary.

    Luckily, the unlikely team shared the motto, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” and they were eager for the challenge. To start, they needed to change the self-identity of the IT branch. For too long had the underutilized IT staff heard the narrative that “technology helps the business succeed,” rather than existing as a part of the business. Lyons and Power placed a heavy emphasis on the new role of cross-functional IT teams as an integral part of the company rather than a useful helper. They adopted the hashtag “#OneTeam,” which promoted interaction and alignment of the tech team with all other teams, and showed everyone working for them that they were fully invested and energized in positively changing the culture and structural hierarchy of Nike. Additionally, they sought to point out the impact each person’s work was playing through the lens of the overall strategy. The “How is what I’m working on going to effect the direction of this company?” question versus “What else do you need me to do?” was a significant change—it boosted the overall motivation of the teams to work together and even raised individual production significantly.

    However, the transformation was only beginning. Early on Power and Lyons discovered a fundamental flaw in the company they sought to transform: Their employees didn’t feel rewarded for their work. While it might be easy for some companies to blow off this issue in favor of dealing with “bigger” issues, they wanted to promote a company culture that would foster growth and speed, which would not—or could not—happen unless their teams felt beyond satisfied with their workplace environment. So, instead of the annual award ceremony Nike regularly used to reward and congratulate its employees, Lyons and Power decided to implement a simple change they felt would satisfy everyone: They added 15 minutes to the end of their weekly Friday staff meeting to give shout-outs everyone who had performed above expectations on a project. It was awkward at first, Lyons admitted. He also described it as “quite American” (ha ha)! However, this simple idea created a complete culture shift. Suddenly, the tech team was being praised by the supply team, while the supply team was being praised by the sales team, and the sales team was being praised by the tech team. This weekly validation of a job well done turned into more jobs well done!

    Ultimately, the agile teams were motivated enough and aligned in such an efficient way that they were able to produce five separate software systems fully integrated into a single one-member profile:

    1. com (full selection of products sold in store)
    2. Nike app (for a more personalized experience)
    3. Sneakers (collection of shoes sold in store)
    4. NRC (for running products)
    5. NTC (for training products)

    These software products were incredibly effective in creating an emotional attachment with the brand and the products. Finally, the goal of getting the customer closer to the product through a digital interface had been achieved. The process to get there wasn’t easy. There were many problems to overcome and many things that changed drastically to allow for a newer and more efficient way of doing things. However, Lyons noted this transformation was the most influential on a personal level for him: Before undertaking this project, he didn’t feel as though he could effectively serve as both a team leader and participant. He could easily take orders and sometimes give them out, but it wasn’t until he partnered with Power that he learned to become a not just a team player, but the best player on his team.

    The DevOps journey was a transformational process for both the company and the people involved. Today, “Just Do It” means exponentially more to Nike than just a slogan—it’s a way of adding value and efficiency to business.

    This was just one of many of great presentations at this years DevOps Enterprise Summit UK this past week. We will be highlighting others in the days ahead.

    — Landon Shimel