The secret to getting your organization to embrace DevOps: ‘Why?’
Why are most IT organizations investing so heavily in the adoption of DevOps practices? That is a question many team members in those IT organizations don’t really have an answer for and may respond by saying, “Because management is telling us to.”
I am a fan of Simon Sinek and his “golden circle” idea. I try to apply it wherever I go. The video of his TEDx talk is one of the most viewed recordings of TEDx events. Definitely worth the 18 minutes, a real mind opener. He is far from an expert in the IT field, but he certainly understands how to inspire people to stand behind transformational efforts and not resist change.
With Sinek’s golden circle in mind, I’ve noticed a pattern while working with different companies on their transformation initiatives, such as DevOps adoption. Most organizations know what needs to be done, and some even know how to get it done. However, very few think about why they’re going through that transformation in the first place, especially at the individual-contributor and junior-management levels.
Let’s now bring this into an IT applications context. Most organizations are being tasked to adopt DevOps as part of their standard practice across development and IT operations. However, teams in those organizations don’t always understand the driver for that mandate – the why. DevOps is just the end result, the outcome of the transformation – the “what.”
Teams try to then figure out the how. How do they transform and achieve the principles of DevOps? This is when the problems start. Each team delineates their roles and responsibilities, but they may not understand the real motivation for changing the way they work. They need more than just an order and a task list to change their ways if they are to stand behind any transformation effort.
That’s when it becomes essential for teams to understand why they are going through all this. Why do they need to change? When employees at all levels in the organization don’t clearly understand why the transformation is necessary to the company, there are a lot more conflict, pushback and scars involved.
So let’s now go back to Sinek’s golden circle and answer the why, how and what of a DevOps transformation.
Why change?
At the heart of DevOps is cultural change. Historically, developers and IT operators have always had different objectives. By design, they work separately with countless processes defined between both teams. Changing that status quo is like taking a marathon runner and turning him into a sprinter. It’s not going to happen overnight; it will take a lot of training, and he may never end up being like Usain “Lightning” Bolt. Still, if faster speeds and shorter runs are the goal, that runner will be in much better physical shape to run short sprints than when he was training for marathons.
In an enterprise environment, changing the culture of organizations is one of the hardest things to accomplish. Having been part of a few failed DevOps transformation attempts myself in the past several years, as well as helping clients successfully go through these types of initiatives, I have experienced the challenge from different points of view.
At the executive level, I’ve learned that the most common reason why companies are trying to transform themselves is to enable the company to change its business faster through the use of software, so it can instantly adapt to changing market conditions and customer demands and, thus, achieve competitive advantage.
The big revelation in that statement is: Companies are now looking at IT as part of their business, not just as a supporting function (check out 4 reasons why DevOps is key to business success for more details). A good example of quickly changing a business model through software is when I was working with a cruise line and its executives wanted to enable a better onboard guest experience by offering services such as shore excursions, picture ordering and restaurant reservations through a new mobile app. Not only would this app fulfill their goals, but it would be a new channel for revenue generation. Now the cruise line is able to add promotions and packages based on availability and utilization in real time. All because this new revenue channel is now driven by software.
At the team level, in that example, the answer to “Why go through this transformation” would be slightly different depending on each team’s perspective:
- Development team: Because they needed to continuously develop and implement new features into the mobile application as well as maintain the existing app, this team needed to evolve from being a very process-oriented, traditionally slow-moving team into a more agile one.
- QA team: They needed to be able to support the accelerated pace at which changes would be introduced into the mobile app, so this team had to adapt to testing much faster and ensure perfect testing coverage.
- Operations team: Since they needed to deploy more frequent builds into production, without any impact to guests or the business, this team needed to sharpen their deployment processes and learn more about modern mobile application monitoring practices in production.
When it is clear why the organization needs to transform and that message is properly articulated by the executive leadership, it becomes each team leader’s responsibility in the IT organization to define how his or her team will contribute toward that company goal.
How do you do it?
By bringing development and IT operations teams together.
That’s the first step, as it brings down communication walls, decreases feedback loops and enhances collaboration across teams.
I’ve witnessed organizations heavily investing in new tools to promote better communication across development and IT operations. Others focused more on defining better processes between the teams. Some just focused on putting everyone in the same room. There is no wrong answer here and not a single path to bringing teams together.
How to adopt DevOps is probably one of the areas most experts write about. The 2016 State of DevOps Report is a great resource for seeing how successful orgs are transforming with DevOps. In line with this blog the reports shows that cultural change continues to be the greatest hurdle to DevOps
One particular example I like to mention is when I was creating an enterprise testing organization for a large multinational consumer packaged goods company. Not only did we have a proper workspace to bring all the teams together (open floor space, no assigned positions), but we also worked close to developers in order to understand how they were planning to develop their application code so that we could build appropriate testing frameworks that would support that code. Later on, we also started working with the operations teams to enable the reuse of some of our automated tests in production for synthetic monitoring, which enabled those teams to monitor different user journeys proactively.
What is it we’re doing?
Simple, DevOps!
The only way to succeed in any transformation is if everyone understands why a change must take place, how you implement that change and what the result will be. Then it becomes more natural for everyone to stand behind any initiative, including DevOps adoption.
Looking at Sinek’s golden circle concept applied to DevOps, you notice, from an IT perspective, we still have DevOps adoption as the ultimate goal of the transformation initiative. However, by applying the golden circle model to that transformation, we’ve been able to help the IT organization understand why it is critical, even vital, for DevOps to be properly adopted.
Not adopting DevOps could cause the company to lose market share, revenue, reputation or worse. Consequently, that could have negative impacts on employees and the very teams that were being asked to use technology to change the business quicker. “What are those impacts?” you may ask. From experience, I can say those could include pay cuts and even massive layoffs.
Beyond DevOps adoption
Once you’ve brought teams together and have enabled your company to make changes faster to its business through software, your next steps will likely be to start looking for ways to further accelerate the implementation of those changes to the business.
That’s when Continuous Delivery takes center stage, to accelerate the build-test-deploy-operate cycle across the different IT teams involved in this process.
Stay tuned for more.
Do you have a DevOps transformation experience to share? Any horror stories or scars? I’m mostly interested in what you’ve learned, but I do like a good story!
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Chief Executive Officer at IGS | Advisor - TCoE and Quality Engineering at Collabera Digital
8 年Excellent field assessment of DevOps implementation...loved it
Applying Simon Sinek's 'Golden Circle' of "Why? What? How?" philosophy is not a new concept. This is something taught in basic project management implementations as well. However, it seems that implementing and communicating the precise "Why" statements is a challenge (and sometimes 'risky') for many executive/leader initiatives and projects. Especially when the initiative/project will change the way the business is performed in the future which in-turn could impact people's current jobs (i.e. job eliminations or reductions). In these cases, the 'Why?" is often not communicated in exact terms. Rather it is watered-down to where it is hard for the individual performer to decipher between the What and the Why so the project team will complete the project without thinking about the future impact of its implementation. Accelerating deployment of mobile applications via DevOps is truly a step to shorten the software development time to keep up with changes in the business environment. Very parallel to AGILE development strategies. But development teams must maintain documentation to enable effective service/maintenance of the software in the future as many of these software applications seem to exceed the life-expectancy and become difficult and expensive to maintain and integrate with newer technologies or applications. Well written article, Alex!
Very good aricle. DevOps is really very important !
Mission completed and returned to base.
8 年The question of 'Why", in my opinion, is one of the most under asked questions in so many aspects of our work and our lives. Seems children are the masters of the question but are all too quickly silenced of their question for the answer. Only as an adult have I learned the answer to 'why' I worked so hard to get my children to stop asking 'why?'. It was because more often than not I did not know why and I didn't want them or anyone else to know that I didn't know why. For some, maybe true today? Why?
Head of Testing Practice. Director of Engineering and Technology, Innovator, Purposeful Disruptor and Conference Speaker.
8 年Good read, Alex Martins! It's simple human nature - seen across the history of mankind - if any one of us don't understand why we do it, we're surely set to fail. Why do we study? why do we work? why do we write an article like this? Unfortunately, in the speed of today's world, the human element of IT is often lost in the frenzy of Tech Adoption, Go To Market and Revenue Generation - it all starts with humans and humans need to understand why they are doing it, so they can then exploit their creativity and contribute building the "How" to really adopt and adapt this new process - called DevOps - which leads to the ultimate "What".