Every journey of significant distance or effort comes with its challenges. The ability of the travelling team to overcome, adapt, learn and persevere distinguishes a great team from a mediocre team. The cloud journey is no different in that it will throw up challenges that need to be overcome, it will question the intent of the journey and even if the journey is worth the effort.
The foundation you have built to undergo this journey needs to be strong, but it can still be challenged and plan for all of the course corrections on your journey. The following items are essential to focus on the outcomes and ensure you are not blindly pushing on when a different path is required.
- Please look at your cloud principles, guardrails and values annually.
- Please review your progress on the journey against the aspirational targets and values every quarter.
- Celebrate the progress of your journey in big and little ways along the way across your organisation.
- Look back and learn from efforts that impacted the journey less than expected. Take the learnings and embed them into the organisation for future steps on the journey. Share and highlight the learnings across the organisation; don't focus on the mistakes.
- Please call out the dead-ends, learn from them and update your principles, guardrails and efforts to ensure that your journey remains impactful for your organisation.
- Sometimes, the journey may need to stop, acknowledge the end, learn from the end, celebrate the learning, and move on to the journey.
- Acknowledge the apathy and effort that is experienced during the journey. Lift those teams that need help to continue and support those that need a different path.
- Build the muscle memory across the organisation to make the journey. A centralised team may get you moving quickly, but they can only carry the organisation through part of the journey. Start early, building the muscle required for the effort on the journey.
- A leader-driven journey can only be sustained for the short term and will struggle to achieve the aspirational outcome. If you are the leader, anchor yourself to guiding the journey and be ready to hand the guiding role to anyone who aids the team, the journey and the aspirational outcomes.
This is the end of a 7 part story of cloud musings that has taken over a year to complete. The reflection for me has been beneficial and part of my learning journey. I especially enjoyed reading the comments on the articles and the direct messages of insights.
Remember to enjoy the journey with your team as much as the outcome. Most of the time, you will be on the journey vs the endpoint. Smile and have fun.
AVP Corporate Infrastructure Delivery Services at TD
1 年Travelling this journey with you has been a gift to embrace. It has pushed me to places that has made me grow. It has thought me to stop- look back and celebrate how far you have come still knowing we have more to embrace. Leveraging lessons learned and sharing with others has been very beneficial to the overall organization. Finally being able to adapt to change, while still grounding on the overall strategy. Thank you for the gift ! Excited to see where the next chapter will take you
Strategic Account Executive - Open Source and Cloud First Observability
1 年Thanks for sharing your insights on lessons in cloud transformations. What I've seen across many of the FI's so far is that the assessment and planning phases do not accurately account for tracking migrations with real time visibility into the impact on velocity and capacity. There is an upfront investment in refactoring and optimizing that often gets missed and leads to migration cost overruns. These are variables that need to be monitored in real time. However, I loved your comment in article 3.1 that if you run a community practice the cost of your oversight and monitoring can outstrip the benefit of velocity. As with everything migrations take planning and thoughtful reassessment throughout.
Vice President - Global Technology
1 年Great read John! You sure have alot to celebrate in this space! TD is so far along the cloud journey because of the amazing followship, team collaboration and always challenging the status quo under your leadership. Still to this day working under you in Cloud engineering was the best experiences of my career. You gave me a chance in a space I had no clue about. Keep being a pioneer and a great mentor and support for others. I wouldn't be where I am today without support from amazing leaders like you! Forever grateful ??
Senior Manager, Control Test Automation
1 年??Great read! My 7 life take away from part 7. Everything worth while in life comes with challenges so: Plan; Constantly assess risk; Celebrate all wins; Reflect and learn from mishaps; Measure progress; Build memory muscles far and wide; Don’t be afraid to pause, reflect, and course correct even if that means pivoting from the initial plan ????
Another enjoyable read! Thanks JVU!