Organisational culture is key to drive DevOps and Agile adoption
Bala Viswanath
Engineering and Data Leader | Experienced Practitioner in Economic Crime Prevention
Most organisations have realised the importance of DevOps and Agile as drivers of strategic transformation but find themselves unable to drive the transformation through over a long period for various reasons. The culture that enables DevOps and Agile adoption needs to be consciously created and nurtured in spite of various short-term temptations, obstacles and priorities.
This is a journey for the long haul but the good news is that once this culture takes root in an organisation irreversibly, the force-multiplier effect gives great competitive advantage to the organisation. The difficult news is that creating and fostering such a culture aligned to effective DevOps and agile adoption is “easier said than done”.
In this article, I want to list two practical suggestions to create and foster such a culture. The first one is Systems thinking. This is the opposite of “Silo” thinking or “Functional” thinking. Employees need to be encouraged to think holistically, end-to-end, from an outside-in perspective putting the end-user or customer at the centre of the thinking process. This customer-centric thinking, when really encouraged in all functions in the organisation, acts as a glue or a common frame of reference for all employees. In many mature universities, undergraduate students in many disciplines take the “Systems Thinking” course as it gives them a strong foundation to visualise and design systems holistically.
Organisations need to recognise the importance of Systems thinking and encourage it actively. The acid test for any organisation is – do the employees who strongly demonstrate this trait get recognised and promoted? If not, this thinking paradigm will wither away over a period of time.
Secondly, organisations have to pro-actively re-organise themselves to drive effective adoption of DevOps and Agile. Old functional boundaries will no longer work and the new organisational setup needs to enable and drive adoption. DevOps and Agile are fundamentally different ways of thinking around designing, developing and deploying complex systems and this needs an enabling organisational structure. The key tests for such a new structure are – does it promote real collaboration at all levels, does it enable blameless post-mortem in retrospectives, does it create rapport and synergy amongst multi-functional agile teams? does it empower employees to “think” and “act” agile?
In summary, getting the pre-requisite enablers right is key to creating a culture that lasts. Unless the right culture takes root, any transformation, however well intentioned, will be temporary and may cause more harm than good. Adoption of DevOps and Agile is a marathon and needs transformative leadership to drive the cultural change.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are the personal views of the author and do not in any way represent the views and opinions of any organisation.
Management professional with specialist skills in Supply Chain Management, Outsourcing, Organization building with an IT background. Personally a traveler and a lover of the outdoors
7 年I would add 'the pressure to stay lean' - though culture is an important factor that could determine if the organization would thrive or perish when pushed to be lean....