The most rewarding aspect of DevOps
is the impact on individuals. To see people that are genuinely happy, and
derive happiness from their work
First, the good news: DevOps
is much more than a process change that speeds up software development and
deployment. It invokes cultural change to the point where peoples' at-work
personalities can actually change -- for the better.
Now the bad news: Moving forward with DevOps
often requires a "trigger event" -- such as a merger or CEO change --
to motivate the organization to fully embrace such change.
These are the observations of Rob Englund, independent IT
management consultant, trainer, and commentator, who has helped bring about DevOps
within New Zealand's largest government organizations. Englund, recently
interviewed by RunAsRadio's Richard Campbell, said gaining executive support
for DevOps
and related transformation can be challenging, but once underway, there is a
"blossoming" effect.
IT leaders in and of themselves find it very hard to be the
initial disruptors, Englund points out.."You may be in an exploratory
phase, with people trying some Agile, and some new tools, but there has to be
some sort of trigger event, or some sort of emergency," he relates.
"Once you've got the trigger, then it's a lot easier to get executive
support and the hearts and minds of people. It's got to be something such as,
'were going to split the organization in two,' or 'we've got a new CEO who
wants to change everything.'"
Because organizations let their dysfunctions build up to a
point where it takes a massive undertaking to set a new course,
technology-driven transformation has to happen with a "big bang,"
Englund relates. In the case of one large government organization he was
working with, transformation had to be all-encompassing to lift the entire
enterprise out of its calcified state. "It was everything -- it was a
cultural problem, it was an absence of automation, it was lots of siloed
thinking and no sharing, it was no measurement and feedback."
The new CIO in this instance had to take bold steps, involving
DevOps,
to move the organization into the 21st century, Englund explains. "He had
to take bold pushes to get started on the journey. He just decreed were going
to start doing cadenced releases. Everything going out the door is integrated
to the core trunk, and just goes out the door."
One of the things about Agile, Englund says, is "you're
going to release on demand, there's going to be lots and lots of little
releases flying out the door. This was the opposite -- everything had to be
integrated together, and all going out the door within six weeks."
The challenge here was that "spaghettified, massive
dependencies and entanglements defeated the theory of rapid deployment,"
he continues. Initially, the organization was able to move to a six-week
cadence of releases "with no technology -- they had mostly manual
environment builds, mostly manual testing." As the organization was able
to get up to speed with automation and new tools, it was able to reduce its
release cycles to four weeks. By the end of the year, the goal is every two
weeks, he adds.
IT service and ITIL-based efforts have not delivered in the
past because they are hinged on executed processes, rather than broader organizational
and people transformation, Englund states. He says he has seen people
transformed as a result of initiatives such as DevOps. "The biggest reward
for me is watching people blossom. There are people who are oppressed by the
system, and unreasonable systems create unreasonable people. If you fix the
system, most people blossom and turn into a different person. Suddenly, they're
happy and cooperative and creative. For me the most rewarding aspect of DevOps
is the impact on individuals. To see people that are genuinely happy, and
derive happiness from their work."
Source: Zdnet
