Mythbusting DevOps in the Enterprise Addressing Culture and Leadership Aspects during Transforming The DevOps movement has been primarily driven by practitioners, which is why we’ve ended up with such success at the practice level. As success and awareness have risen, we’ve now seen new challenges and questions around the path to success and applicability for larger organizations. Some have done this very well, others are struggling, and others yet have no idea where to start. This paper focuses … [Read more...]
Seven Papers on Organizational Change
1) Thinking Environments Evaluating Organizational Models for DevOps to Accelerate Business and Empower Workers While the traditional IT organization is structured into functional silos, DevOps relies on empowered, cross-functional teams. Is it possible to blend the two approaches and work within the traditional structure? Or do you need to restructure your organization to support DevOps? The traditional structure offered a way to continuously improve skills in individual practice areas—software … [Read more...]
Playbook to Bust Bureaucracy
So, you’re in an organization, running up against bureaucratic impediments when you try to do what you’re pretty sure is the right thing. Perhaps you’re leading a digital transformation and your company’s bureaucracy is resisting change, fighting to lock in ways of doing things that belong to the days before the Paleolithic era. You’re up against a vast leviathan of a bureaucracy. What should you do? Like many business and technology authors, I’m going to tell you a bunch of stuff based on my … [Read more...]
How to Fix Bureaucracy
This post is an excerpt from Mark Schwartz's The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy. There are three things we must do to eliminate bureaucracy’s Kafkaesque aspects. We must make it lean by removing waste and shrinking lead times. We must make it capable of learning; that is, changing as the environment changes and as better ways are found to accomplish goals. And we must make it enabling—that is, helpful as a way to get things done rather than a no-saying, gatekeeping, troll-controlled … [Read more...]
Incident Analysis: Your Organization’s Secret Weapon
This post has been adapted from Nora Jones' 2021 DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual - Europe presentation. You can view the full presentation here. We've all had incidents. They're unexpected. They're stressful. And sometimes in management, there's inevitable questions that creep up. What can we do to prevent this from ever happening again? What caused this? Why did this take so long to fix? The organizations I've worked in, and the research that myself and my team have done in this … [Read more...]
Turning an Outage into a Powerful Learning Opportunity at CSG
An outage can be one of the most horrifying and stressful experiences for many tech organizations. Most ops engineers have at least a few horror stories in their pocket. But does an incident have to be this way? We've seen the proposed Incident Management Framework presented in a recent white paper and explored on our own blog. In this post, we share a case study of one organization that used some of these new methodologies to turn their biggest outage into powerful learning opportunity. The … [Read more...]
The Post-Incident Review
Once an incident is resolved, there is a tendency to move on and go back to normal daily work. This is a missed opportunity to gather critical learnings and understand true system behavior as well as process and system breakdowns. As part of the new Prepare/Respond/Review Incident Management Framework, conducting effective post-incident reviews and taking clear actions based on those review is essential. Post-Incident Reviews Post-incident reviews are a key component of an organization’s … [Read more...]
Using Swarming for Incident Response
The traditional model of incident management using ticket handling progresses a ticket through multiple tiers: L1, L2, L3. This model creates queues that elongate response times and create ticket handoffs, which loses vital context with each group. In complex systems and failures, the ticket is delayed in getting to the correct responders. The end result is long response times and customer frustration. In the new Prepare/Respond/Review Incident Management Framework, we advise against using this … [Read more...]
Building an Incident Management Response Team
When many organizations are faced with an incident, the lack of clear roles and responsibilities among the teams leads to poor collaboration, communication, and work overload. This in turn leads to missed tasks, redundant work, loss of information, delays, and frustration within the team. Without clear roles, incident response and resolution can be delayed, and the quality of response for the team and the customer is poor. As part of the Prepare/Respond/Review Incident Management Framework, the … [Read more...]
Getting Started with Dojos for Technology Organizations
With the new digital economy, many organizations are facing an unparalleled rate of change and having trouble keeping up. Agile/DevOps Dojos can be a uniquely powerful vehicle for accelerating digital transformation in an enterprise. This post will explain what an Agile/DevOps Dojo is, how to maximize the power of it, and how to create your own company Agile/DevOps Dojo. Written by experts in the field, Ross Clanton (formerly of Target and Verizon, and currently of American Airlines), Jaclyn … [Read more...]
