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August 24, 2017

Featured Resource: Individual contributors

By IT Revolution

Leading up to DevOps Enterprise Summit 2017 San Francisco, we’ll be releasing our most valuable DevOps resources to our community on a weekly basis.

Each of these resources come to you straight from the DevOps Enterprise Forum, where more than 50 technology leaders and thinkers gather for three days to create written guidance on the best-known methods for overcoming the top obstacles in the DevOps Enterprise community.


In many organizations, there are individuals that could be considered critical to the organization and are the lone holdouts to the DevOps transformation. These holdouts are often longer term employees that have historically experienced false starts around transformational change. These failed attempts at driving toward a new framework or culture may have disenfranchised the individual contributors and caused them to withdraw from supporting the efforts.

This resource 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.

We will discuss this in two sections:

  1. Building Transformational Change —  We explore some of the common archetypes of “holdouts;” develop an understanding of the root cause of the behavior by evaluating their incentives, drivers, and fears; and discuss tactics and frameworks for re-engagement.
  2. The Process Flow — When experimenting with which tactic works best on any specific “holdout,” we want to follow a rapid and repeatable process flow. In this section, we discuss the process used to help re-engage the employee in the transformation taking place in the organization, while making sure not to alienate them further.

The authors on each of these resources will be prominent figures in the industry, and on this particular one, we have five industry leaders working together. They include:

  • Pauly Comtois, VP, Hearst Business Media
  • Scott Nasello, Senior Manager, Platforms & Systems Engineering, Columbia Sportswear
  • Avigail Ofer, Sr. Director, Communications and Online Marketing, Electric Cloud
  • Anders Wallgren, CTO, Electric Cloud
  • Chris Hill, DevOps Infotainment and Software Manager, Jaguar Land Rover

Here are two amazing presentations from authors on this week’s resource.

Anders Wallgren

Pauly Comtois


If you’re eager to continue learning about these topics and more, come see how you can be a part of DevOps Enterprise Summit 2017 San Francisco. We spend three days talking with the leaders of large, complex organizations implementing DevOps principles and practices, with the goal to give leaders (like you) the tools and practices they need to develop and deploy software faster and to win in the marketplace.

- About The Authors
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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.

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