A series of advice blogs from DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 presenters.
We’ve all met that colleague. The one who just won’t get behind DevOps.
No matter their reasons, here’s some great advice on what to say to those reluctant colleagues from top experts from DevOps Enterprise Summit.
“We say ‘Deploy more. Sleep better.’ This of course assumes the developer has quality ownership. If the developer can use Grenade Driven Development to hand off the pain of poor quality and is only responsible for coding, then there’s no incentive. They will continue to be successful by optimizing for output instead of outcomes. It’s critical that the environment incentivizes quality ownership.”
—Bryan Finster, Value Stream Architect, Walmart DevOps Dojo, Walmart
“My team doesn’t want to be woken up for something only you know how to fix.”
—Dave Mangot, Principal, Mangoteque
“Read The Phoenix Project.”
—Mick Miller, Senior Product Manager, Cloud Native, KeyBank
“I would ask them if they want to spend less time operating and more time writing code. Because that will be the end game.”
—Adam Shake, Director of Site Reliability Engineering, MediaMath Source
“How would you like teams to get out of the way of your delivery efforts? By embracing a core set of principals, practices, and frameworks you can remove most major impediments to your delivery efforts.”
—Christopher McFee, Director of DevOps Practices, KeyBank
“I would ask them what they value about their current way of working that they wouldn’t want to lose. It could be that they believe DevOps would take something away when in fact it might strengthen it.”
—Jeffrey Fredrick, Coauthor of Agile Conversations
“Read this book (The Phoenix Project) and tell me what you think.”
—Roman Pickl, Technical Project Manager and Continuous Improvement Agent, Elektrobit
“Are you willing to try an experiment?”
—David Stanke, Developer Advocate, Google
“You have the ability to shape the product that customers are using at every phase.”
—Jonathan Akers, Product Owner – RadioCentral, Motorola Solutions
I live with this dilemma, where most of my colleagues hate DevOps. They either have had poor experience at it, or like many people they don’t like change, or they’re so committed to Waterfall that somehow leaving it means living something behind (I don’t know what) which they see as too big of a loss. I’m glad that you’ve put in some suggestions. I’ll try it, but even so I’ve got little hope that DevOps will succeed. There are two reasons for this. First, we tried DevOps about two years ago, and the person perceived as the champion of DevOps left, so it fell by the wayside.
Second, we’ve started trying DevOps again. But like many others before us, we’re relying only on the tools to bring about the DevOps change. The process hasn’t and won’t change. People aren’t interesting in changing the process. So, I predict DevOps will fail again.
“Invite over Inflict: Invite participation with intrinsic motivation and empowerment. The words “resist” or “convince” should not enter the vocabulary.” (see “Sooner Safer Happier” by Jonathan Smart)