Books & Free Resources

Do you really understand what business value is? Information technology can and should deliver business value. But the Agile literature has paid scant attention to what business value means—and how to know whether or not you are delivering it. This problem becomes ever more critical as you push value delivery toward autonomous teams and away from requirements “tossed over the wall” by business stakeholders. An empowered team needs to understand its goal!

Increase profitability, elevate work culture, and exceed productivity goals through DevOps practices. More than ever, the effective management of technology is critical for business competitiveness. This non-fiction follow-up to The Phoenix Project shows leaders how to replicate these incredible outcomes, by demonstrating how to integrate Product Management, Development, QA, IT Operations, and Information Security to elevate your company and win in the marketplace.

Leading the Transformation is an executive guide, providing a clear framework for improving development and delivery. Instead of the traditional Agile and DevOps approaches that focus on improving the effectiveness of teams, this book targets the coordination of work across teams in large organizations—an improvement that executives are uniquely positioned to make.

If someone stole your wallet, you'd notice it. So why don't people notice when they are robbed of something much more valuable than their wallet—time?

In this timely book, IT time management expert Dominica DeGrandis reveals the real crime of the century—time theft, one of the most costly factors impacting enterprises in their day-to-day operations. Through simple solutions that make work visible, DeGrandis helps people round up the five thieves of time and take back their lives with time-saving solutions.

Learn how to recognize problems that happen in IT organizations; how these problems jeopardize nearly every commitment the business makes in Development, IT Operations, and Information Security; and how DevOps techniques can fix the problem to help the business win.

Third Edition Coming January 2018!

In a fast-paced and entertaining style, narrator Chris Ruen brings to life a story by three luminaries of the DevOps movement. Listeners will not only learn how to improve their own IT organizations, they'll never view IT the same way again.

It’s not enough to say that the CIO is the geek who wears the suit, IT leaders must, now more than ever, take a seat at the table.

In A Seat at the Table, CIO Mark Schwartz explores the role of IT leadership as it is now and opens the door to reveal IT leadership as it should be—an integral part of the value creation engine. With wit and an easy style, Schwartz reveals that the only way to become an Agile IT leader is to be courageous—to throw off the attitude and assumptions that have kept CIOs from taking their rightful seat at the table. CIOs, step on up, your seat at the table is waiting for you.

Coming Soon!

Mirco Hering, a thought leader in managing IT within legacy organizations, shows IT managers how to elevate performance by successfully adopting DevOps, one of the most successful and proven IT management forms used by high-performing businesses today.

Many organizations list a skills gap as one of their primary obstacles to achieving and sustaining a high-functioning DevOps-based organization. This paper attempts to provide practical guidance to organizations on developing, recruiting, and retaining DevOps talent.

Most organizations have challenges with optimizing for the delivery of business outcomes. Technology delivery takes too long, costs too much, and often ends up missing the mark when it finally makes it to production. Often it can be unclear why this is happening and blame is cast in all directions. This paper is intended to provide guidance and a framework for organizations to use to determine the highest business priority and maximum allowable WIP (work in process) to improve speed to market, optimizing delivery of business outcomes, and to create strategic alignment between business and technology.

Technology leaders today face a host of issues as IT organizations work to keep up with changing demands, complex business goals, and the need to deliver faster services and results in ever-changing business and technology environments. The goal of this paper is to provide the reader with an understanding of the key modern architectural and technical practices and, more importantly, some patterns of adoption that are successful ways to accelerate any DevOps practice. Modern technology practices, when implemented well, can bring a whole host of benefits. In addition, we will walk the reader through a few case studies that map the journey from adoption of these key modern tech practices to positive business outcomes.

How do you build momentum and go from a few islands of DevOps goodness to a tipping point where the entire organization embraces common DevOps methods? This paper provides guidance to leaders (change agents) who see DevOps activity in different teams, groups, or departments in their organization and are looking to build community and promote growth. This paper will help you connect the pockets of DevOps goodness that may already exist within your organization and harness them to drive change.

The objective of this paper is to identify the individual(s) that could be considered critical to the organization and are the lone holdouts to the DevOps transformation. This paper seeks to identify practical approaches to categorizing the personalities of the resistant individuals and help identify a clear path that will align them closer to the movement.

Advancing the state of measurement practice is an important foundation for improving software delivery economics. This paper summarizes a position on DevOps measurement that we intend to be a catalyst for accelerating more mature guidance on measuring and steering software delivery.

Anyone leading a company through a DevOps transformation will encounter minor to significant internal skepticism or lack concrete experience. This document lists the most common leadership and cultural traps and provides high-level reassurance and evidence that DevOps practices are generally applicable and plausibly successful in enterprise environments.

Many organizations adopting DevOps patterns and practices are enjoying the benefits that come from that adoption. More speed. Higher quality. Better value. However, these organizations often get stymied when applying test automation to their large legacy codebases. This whitepaper will look at common objections to adopting test automation and tactics for overcoming those objections.

If you are leading a DevOps transformation, a large part of your success will come from your ability to lead change at different levels in the organization. Achieving these changes will be hard, time-consuming, and require persistence, but they are worth the effort when your organization begins reaping the benefits from the transformation.This paper explores a variety of tactics that can be used to help achieve the mindset changes required and influence behavior and actions.

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? This paper discusses ways to approach organization with DevOps in mind.

Many organizations often get stymied when dealing with information security, compliance, and audit requirements. There seems to be a misconception that DevOps practices won’t work in organizations which are under SOX or PCI regulations. In this paper, seven experts provide high-level guidance on three major concerns about DevOps Practices: DevOps and Change Control, DevOps and Security, DevOps and Separation of Duties.

As organizations continually evolve and rely on cross-functional teams coming together and adopting DevOps practices, the process of delivering software products must also evolve. In this paper, the authors show how value stream architecture facilitates organizational process change and transparency, and should be the primary focus for every organization striving for DevOps greatness.