DevOps strategy and practice part 3: Culture of Change

This month's Azure Recipe is actually the last part (part 3) of a series on DevOps strategy and practice that I'd published in the beginning of the year. Yes, it'd taken me all of 9 months to come back to finish it right before Christmas :) It's a little less 'recipe' for Azure Recipes, but hey, it is still a recipe for DevOps adoption!

In part 1, we saw how an automated deployment workflow needs to be established first with an application team within the organization. In part 2, we saw how the workflow established in part 1 can be augmented to introduce enhanced security and other best practices for the various cloud environments. In this part 3, we are finally ready to look at DevOps culture.?

Application build teams used to be the unlikeliest of places you’ll find advocating about company culture, but alas, it actually makes a lot of sense. Whether you’re in sales, operations, accounting or etc., chances are, your team and broader Enterprise organization operates on predefined workflows. It is also very likely in these modern times that some software tools bind and enable this workflow. For example, use of a CRM by a sales team or an ERP by operations.??

Over the past couple of decades, Application culture had permeated the psyche of the employee just by the fact that it has become the primary tool that the employee use to, well, work! Don’t agree? Just reflect on how much time you spent on e-mails a day. If not email, you’ll likely use some other apps quite often.??

But what is Application culture??

Application Culture?

Culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people. Application culture encompasses the shared patterns of behaviour and interaction that revolves around Applications, i.e. how we communicate, what we do at work and at home, what we think about when we need something done.?

How we got here?

Although software had been around in modern form since the 60s, software as Applications really exploded in the 80s with the introduction of the Personal Computer, and well, software applications such as Microsoft Excel.?

As offices start adopting Applications, office dwellers soon realize that everything is faster and easier in digital form via apps. With the Internet, apps in the form of websites became the primary mode of engagement for many Enterprises, for sustainability and scale. Soon, work and business became about Apps, either the use of it or the making of it.?

Today, Apps are the concrete representation of the Enterprise, be it the ERP that records everything that happens within it, the Office apps or the digital front or marketplace that the company serves to its customers.?

DevOps and Application Culture?

Here’s where things get interesting. You know those folks involved in putting your workflow applications in place, they’d not stopped at making applications for your work processes only. They, or rather the profession itself had gone and made applications that govern and enable their own workflow. Thus, DevOps is born. ?

DevOps?is ultimately about continuously improving and adapting the process that creates the best Applications. The best Applications enable successful business workflows in a rapidly changing environment.?

Conducive culture for DevOps success

DevOps success needs a culture that is used to having changes happen continuously. This doesn’t mean that employees won’t get the “finished goods” feel with their workflow. What it does mean is that employees should feel empowered to continue providing feedback on that workflow, especially the Applications that are part of that workflow.?DevOps is about continuous feedback (as seen in the framework above) and the Changes that follows (from Application build to deployment to ultimately business workflow changes). ?

Now, cultivating a culture that is ready to embrace change is a whole topic in itself. Nevertheless, you're likely to have a head start because it is also quite likely that there is already an Application culture in your organization.

In any case, I hope this part 3 of the DevOps strategy and practice series gives you an opinionated perspective on what to focus on for this important part of DevOps adoption: creating a Culture of Change.

To continue diving deeper on the topic of Change, I recommend Why the ADKAR Blueprint is a Game Changer for Change by Lisa Kempton