Authentic Leadership for DevOps, Lean IT, and Agile – Why It Matters Now More Than Ever Before

With so much being written about the promise of DevOps, Agile, and Lean IT digital transformation, it’s important to note that a key ingredient often absent is effective leadership from the top. I believe that IT possesses unique challenges that require strong authentic leadership. The good news is that these skills can be learned, practiced, and mastered over time, but they require a firm commitment from the CIO and his leadership team.

Authentic Leadership

The success of the transformation begins - and all too often ends - based on the degree the CIO actively leads and authentically connects. To lead people effectively, leaders must understand the “Why,” the “What,” and the “How.” This is a mindset, skill set, and toolset that needs to be learned, practiced and adjusted based on the culture of the specific organization and the challenges they encounter. Leaders throughout the organization must be able to relate to people at a very real and meaningful level that fosters trust, transparency, respect, and new ways of working across silos. This is tricky stuff for anyone and the CIO is the pivotal influencer of how seriously and deeply people will go to make their transformation succeed.

If people perceive a leader's engagement to be less than genuine or their level of commitment to be superficial, it’s only a matter of time before they disconnect from the transformation effort. For DevOps, Lean IT, and Agile to succeed, people need to be “all in” and willing to work harder than they have ever worked in their careers. In many cases, this will be the most challenging work they have encountered.

The Reality of IT

The speed of change in the global marketplace is accelerating and putting tremendous pressure on IT organizations to keep pace with innovation generated by more agile and responsive competition. Sometimes the competition is from smaller startups, but not always. It can also come from organizations that are further along in their transformation journey. Barriers to entry are fading fast and disruptive technologies are transforming industries at a rapid pace (consider Airbnb, Uber, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, and the Internet of Things’ impact on Lodging, Transportation, Retail, Entertainment, Banking, and Healthcare).

IT has always been a challenging place to work, but today we live in a high-pressure environment with an inherent tension between stability/security and flexibility/innovation. Our customers and the business want both. They expect systems to be up 99.9% of the time with zero security breaches, while simultaneously presuming they can have rapid change cycles of defect-free deployments at a pace dictated by current and future customers.

Why Leadership is Key

Currently, most DevOps, Lean IT, and Agile transformations are not led by CIOs. They are often led by the director of operations, chief architect, or director of development. While it is good these people have been given the authority and/or responsibility to introduce a significant change in the way work gets done, there is a potential downside. Without the vision, alignment, and commitment a CIO brings to the discussion, IT transformations can collapse for many reasons including lack of commitment across the entire IT service delivery value stream, conflicting priorities, entrenched silos within IT, lack of internal coaching and support, and overburden of bottleneck resources (just to name a few).

Transformation Killers

Throughout my 25 years in IT, I have seen many attempts at transformational improvement including RAD, XP, Scrum, Lean, Agile, and most recently DevOps. Here’s my short list of essentials that need to be in place for successful change to happen and sustain:

1.    Leaders and managers actively engaged in new ways of working with teams to support continuous learning and improvement

2.    A steadfast commitment by the CIO, their direct reports, and the next level of management to commit to the new approach (be it Lean IT, DevOps, Agile, or some other approach)

3.    Internal coaches who are equipped to model and support the new behaviors required for success

4.    Key work systems which nurture and support the behaviors needed to drive higher levels of team performance and value-stream level collaboration

5.    A cultural norm that values learning through experimentation and structured problem solving with a tenacious desire to improve incrementally through many small trials, rather than one large change

Mike Orzen has been practicing, experimenting, and learning what drives IT excellence through the application of Lean thinking and respectful leadership for over twenty years. He lives in Portland, Oregon and can be reached at [email protected].