Advice on Getting Teams to Accept Change

A series of advice blogs from DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 presenters.

Change is always hard. And harder for some than others. In this post, we continue our series of advice blogs from DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 presenters.

What is your top advice for getting teams to accept change?

“Bring them information on how it makes their lives better. Have engineers who’ve worked this way evangelize this way of working. Those of us who’ve been on this journey for a while will not go back to artisanal development because we get more job satisfaction from frequent delivery of useful changes and seeing the end users lives improve continuously.”
—Bryan Finster, Value Stream Architect, Walmart DevOps Dojo, Walmart

“Change is normal. You can fight it as much as you like. Until you learn to accept it, you’ll never feel comfortable.”
—Dave Mangot, Principal, Mangoteque

“Demonstrate/show that more change is better than inventorying change. We have tripled our weekly releases since last year.”
—Mick Miller, Senior Product Manager, Cloud Native, KeyBank

“Sell the vision. Paint the end game picture. Get everyone pointed at the goal in a way they believe in.”
—Adam Shake, Director of Site Reliability Engineering, MediaMath Source

“Prove it. Many people need to see evidence with use cases that resonate with them. They also need to feel safe with what the changes mean. As an example automation should not mean staff cuts, it should mean that the toil goes away and they can focus on value added activities.”
—Christopher McFee, Director of DevOps Practices, KeyBank

“In my experience teams are quite happy to change when they have a voice. They reject change when it is foisted upon them without consideration of their experience and viewpoint.”
—Jeffrey Fredrick, coauthor of Agile Conversations

“Involve them early, show whats possible, let them finish it their way.”
—Roman Pickl, Technical Project Manager and Continuous Improvement Agent, Elektrobit

“Use their words and reflect their values, not yours. Do the work to frame the motivation for change from their point of view.”
—David Stanke, Developer Advocate, Google

“Show the benefits and let them decide if it’s best for them. We start with all the benefits our team has realized and show real world examples.”
—Jonathan Akers, Product Owner – RadioCentral, Motorola Solutions

- About The Authors

IT Revolution

Trusted by technology leaders worldwide. Since publishing The Phoenix Project in 2013, and launching DevOps Enterprise Summit in 2014, we’ve been assembling guidance from industry experts and top practitioners.

Follow IT Revolution on Social Media

• 
• 
•