In the following excerpt from Episode 19 of The Idealcast, Gene Kim and Steven Spear interviewed Trent Green, SVP and COO of Legacy Health, on how he and his team used iterative problem solving to vaccinate 8,000 people a day at Oregon's largest mass vaccination clinic. Key learnings from this excerpt include the idea that organizations are really a collection of interdependent microsystems, that you can't improve a process until you stabilize a process, and sometimes you have to slow down to … [Read more...]
Organizational Culture and Integrated Problem Solving: Excerpt from Ep. 17 of The Idealcast
The culture of an organization is important. It makes a difference in how everything comes out. In this excerpt for Episode 17 of The Idealcast, Gene Kim espouses on Ron Westrum’s question: How do you measure culture? --- I just wanted to break in quickly and give some more information on what Dr. Westrum was just referring to, because believe it or not, this also came up in the workshop that I took at MIT with Dr. Steven Spear in 2014. NASA: Experimental versus Compliance-Driven … [Read more...]
Westrum’s Organizational Model in Technology Organizations
This post was adapted from Chapter 3 of Accelerate: the Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren, PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim. --- It is practically a truism in DevOps circles that culture is of huge importance. However, culture is intangible; there exist many definitions and models of culture. Our challenge was to find a model of culture that was well-defined in the scientific literature, could be measured … [Read more...]
Three Observations on Leading through Writing
AN EXCERPT FROM EPISODE 16 OF THE IDEALCAST WITH GUEST ADMIRAL JOHN RICHARDSON I had mentioned in part one of my interview with Admiral John Richardson, how much I admired the two documents that Admiral Richardson had shared with me. One had the title A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority. And the other was the Navy Leader Development Framework. I loved both documents because they were both so clearly written. And it was such a treat listening to Admiral Richardson and Dr. Steve Spear … [Read more...]
Building a Culture of Leaders from Day One in the US Navy
AN EXCERPT FROM EPISODE 16 OF THE IDEALCAST WITH GUEST ADMIRAL JOHN RICHARDSON Gene Kim: One of the things that really leapt out at me is your emphasis around leadership development. You had once told Steve Spear and me a story about the extent that you went to, to reinvigorate training, to toughen up the training. You had this incredible story about how that training came about. Getting away from the post 1940 human conveyor belt mentality and the amazing outcome that resulted from it. Could … [Read more...]
Learning Culture vs. Compliance Culture
An Excerpt from Episode 15 of The Idealcast with Guest Admiral John Richardson Gene Kim: I think we've all witnessed situations where an organization that once exhibited dynamic learning characteristics, well, they start to calcify. When I attended Dr. Steve Spear's workshop at MIT in 2014, I loved the way he cast the US space program in the 1960s as one of fundamental dynamic learning. I recently read Gene Kranz' book, Failure Is Not an Option. And I love the way he described his role in it, a … [Read more...]
Announcing Season 2 of The Idealcast with Gene Kim
I loved Season 1 of the The Idealcast because it was a way to further learn from some of the people I admire most within the DevOps Enterprise community. It has really helped me clarify, in my own mind, why organizations work the way they do—both in the ideal and not ideal—and what the conditions are to really enable greatness Season 2 is going to be incredible because it includes guests from outside the DevOps Enterprise community whose work I truly admire. We’ll hear from Admiral John … [Read more...]
State of DevOps: 2020 and Beyond
What Happened in 2020 Most organizations entered 2020 with a plan, and all those plans were completely upended by a global pandemic and the economic downturn that happened afterward. And yet I think 2020 has been illuminating in showing what technology can do in a time of incredible crisis. I experienced this myself with DevOps Enterprise Summit. In a normal year, we host two in-person conferences in the US and UK. Of course in 2020, an in-person conference where thousands of people fly into a … [Read more...]
Measure Software Delivery Performance with Four Key Metrics
This post has been adapted from Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps by Nicole Forsgren, PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim. There are many frameworks and methodologies that aim to improve the way we build software products and services. We wanted to discover what works and what doesn’t in a scientific way, starting with a definition of what “good” means in this context. This post presents the four key metrics to measure software delivery performance. MEASURING SOFTWARE DELIVERY … [Read more...]
8 Recommended Talks from DevOps Enterprise Summit (and Why)
Recently, I was speaking with a friend in a large bank, and I ended up writing him a letter recommending some talks that I thought would be useful. Below I list each of them, along with why I think they'd be of interest. 1) Credit Suisse from London - Virtual 2020 Andrea Hausmann, Head of Program Strategy & Engagement, Credit SuisseDuncan Lawie, Director, DevOps and Development Practices, Credit Suisse I think this is a super interesting talk, because they’re a centralized group that owns … [Read more...]
