The world changed on June 26, 2018. It happened quietly. Few people even noticed. But that was the day that, after more than a century, General Electric, the last original member of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, was removed from the index. GE was one of just a dozen firms that Charles Dow included in his list in 1896. The company appeared alongside giants such as American Tobacco, American Sugar Refining Company, and Tennessee Coal and Iron, companies that dominated what Carlota Perez, an … [Read more...]
Advice on Starting and Maintaining a Learning Culture
A series of advice blogs from DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 presenters. How do you create a learning culture? "Learning demands vulnerability. When we authentically learn, we take a risk that we'll learn something about ourselves that changes our self-image. If you want to build a learning culture, you first have to build a culture of care. Care makes learning safe."—Matt K. Parker, author "It might seem silly, but just ask: 'What did we learn last week/sprint/year?" a lot."—Jon Moore, … [Read more...]
Advice on Starting a DevOps Transformation at a Large Enterprise
A series of advice blogs from DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 presenters. How? It's a simple question, really. But just how do you start a DevOps transformation at a large enterprise? Like so many big endeavors, it's the simple act of how and when to take that first step that can be the most daunting. We pulled together advice from top leaders in the industry who have all had to take that first step. Here's what they have to say: How do you start a DevOps transformation? "You first need to … [Read more...]
Making Bureaucracy Lean, Learning and Enabling
This post is a transcript of Mark Schwartz's DevOps Enterprise Summit- London 2020 presentation. Hi everyone. My name is Mark Schwartz. I'm an enterprise strategist with Amazon Web Services. I think I've spoken at every one of these DevOps Enterprise Summits since 2014, so I hope you're not getting tired of me yet. I think some of you might also have read one or more of my books. There's The Art of Business Value, A Seat at the Table, and War and Peace and IT. And the exciting … [Read more...]
Managing People, Not Resources in a DevOps Enterprise
This post is adapted from the book DevOps for the Modern Enterprise by Mirco Hering. Some people react allergically when you call people resources and talk about managing resources. While not exactly allergic, I agree with the underlying sentiment. A resource is something you can manage without much tailoring; you can treat one bag of sand like the next bag of sand when it comes to making dikes. With people, that is never true. We have probably all been planning for projects and … [Read more...]
The 3 Real Risks Every Project Manager Should Focus On
Adapted from War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age by Mark Schwartz. It turns out that people are pretty terrible at assessing probabilities and risk. In my last book, A Seat at the Table, I cited several examples to make this point—examples that I love because even knowing the right answer I still can’t convince myself it is right. The first example had to do with the TV game show Let’s Make a Deal, in which the contestant is asked to choose … [Read more...]
24 Key Capabilities to Drive Improvement in Software Delivery
This post is adapted from an excerpt of Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim. Our research, based on four years of the State of DevOps Report, has uncovered 24 key capabilities that drive improvements in software delivery performance in a statistically significant way. The book Accelerate details these findings. This post provides you with a handy list of these capabilities. We have classified these capabilities into five categories. Within each category, the … [Read more...]
Quick Guide to DevOps for the Non-IT Business Leader
Adapted from War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age by Mark Schwartz. What is DevOps 1) Small Teams of T-Shaped People DevOps is practiced in small teams, say five to nine people. Small teams can communicate among themselves face-to-face, thereby avoiding the overhead of passing around and perfecting documents. Each team is cross-functional, with skills in software development, testing, infrastructure engineering, operations, and … [Read more...]
Why: Finding the Balance for Joint Design
This post was adapted from episode 124 of the Troubleshooting Agile podcast with Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel. As we get to chapter 4 in our tour through Agile Conversations, it’s time to talk about joint design. In this post we focus on a common error that we didn’t cover in depth in the book: how trying to “convince” someone through advocacy fails. Using the Four Rs, we role play an ineffective advocacy-heavy conversation about tech team execution, and then revise it to … [Read more...]
The Battle of Borodino: Business as a Complex Adaptive System
Adapted from War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age by Mark Schwartz. In War and Peace, Tolstoy writes of the battle of Borodino, in which Napoleon (sort of) defeats Russia and wins the opportunity to watch Moscow burn, though not much more. The day before the battle, he walks the battlefield and gives his commanders orders for the disposition of the troops—orders which are, for the most part, ignored. During the battle, he stands in … [Read more...]
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