Featured Resource: Tactics for Leading Change

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.

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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.

In this week’s resource, we explore a variety of tactics that can be used to help achieve the mindset changes required and influence behavior and actions.

This paper is divided into three sections:

1. Leading Changes at Different Levels in the Organization —In order to effectively create change within our organization, we need to understand the different perspectives of the people we’re engaging with. In this section, we describe two different perspectives (the executive and the middle manager), what someone at that level cares about, and what problems they are probably encountering.
2. Target Mindset — Next, we want to help enable change agents trying to shift the mindset of the organization to a targeted mindset more aligned with DevOps patterns and practices.
3. Tactic Details — Finally, your strategy for leading change can include a variety of tactics, and the one that will work best for you depend on your particular circumstances and context.  In this section, we discuss 23 different tactics you can assemble into a plan that works for you and your organization.

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

• Courtney Kissler, Vice President, Retail Technology, Starbucks
• Eric Passmore, CTO Online Publishing and Media, Microsoft
• Jeff Gallimore, Partner, Excella Consulting
• Jeff Robke, Senior Software Engineer, IBM CIO Development Platform Team
• Nicole Forsgren, CEO & Chief Scientist, DORA
• Paula Thrasher, Director Digital Services, CSRA
• Pauly Comtois, VP, Hearst Business Media
• Rafael Garcia, Director of R&D IT, Hewlett-Packard
• Rosalind Radcliffe, Distinguished Engineer, IBM
• Ross Clanton, Director / Fellow – Technology Transformation at Verizon
• Scott Nasello, Senior Manager, Platforms & Systems Engineering, Columbia Sportswear Company
• Scott Willson, Product Marketing Director, Release Automation, Automic
  

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

Rosalind Radcliffe

Scott Wilson

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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.