The effect of weak links

In this excellent analysis, The O-Ring theory of DevOps, Adrian Colyer has laid out why you need to pursue excellence across the board to make the most of your IT organisation. Although the analysis is in the context of a DevOps process, I think the lessons are more widely applicable. I encourage you to read it all, but I'll highlight a few of my key points here:

Quotes

If you want to be a high performing organisation, the pursuit of excellence across the board in your IT processes and practices is no longer optional.

 Small differences in quality quickly compound to make very large differences between the performance of the best-in-class and the rest

The better you already are, the more value you get from improving your weaknesses

Due in part to my military background, I tend to apply the OODA loop to thinking about organisation, so this all makes perfect sense: If one part of your process is suboptimal then there's not really much point making the good bits better. For example, if you're already good at gathering information (i.e. you have good metrics and event processing - the first O of OODA) but you don't make the best use of that information (say you don't build actionable insight from the data you gather - the D of OODA) then making the good part better is going to provide minimal benefit.

Stan McChrystal writes about this in his excellent book, Team of Teams.

Takeaways

• Employ a kaizen approach: continuously seek to improve that which you do.
• Aim your improvement efforts at the area that lags behind the most. *
• Your team is only as good as the weakest member.
• Optimise your speed through the OODA loop. This is a cumulative advantage, and it's this that leads to the 200x improvement mentioned in the article. 

* This is also a takeaway from The Theory of Constraints. If you haven't already, everyone in IT or Ops should read The Pheonix Project which approaches the ToC as a novel/parable.