Driving change and building a high-performance DevOps culture

Wed, 22 Jan 2020 18:31:01 +0000

I had the pleasure of listening to Mark Schwartz live at ReInvent 2019 and I was amazed by his wealth of knowledge and insights when it comes to organizational transformation.

His presentation was Driving change and building a high-performance DevOps culture and it caught my interest!

Mark Schwartz: Enterprise Strategist, Amazon Web Services.

If you’re not sure who Mark is, you may have heard of some of his books:

The Art of Business Value
A Seat at the Table: (IT Leadership in the Age of Agility)
War and Peace and IT: (Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age)

If you haven’t heard of these books, you now have a new reading list :)

What I learnt (My Notes)

Communication between leaders, middle management (“frozen middle”) and builders
What is the job of QA?
How to do skunk works projects (experiment at fast pace with low risk)
What decisions makers want

How to sell & what execs want
Making better use of data

Driving change and building a high-performance DevOps culture (DOP207)

You can watch the same presentation I saw live — https://youtu.be/o9XgEpOj3f0.

Below is an overview of the slides/content from Mark’s presentation.

Transformational change can be driven from anywhere in an organization.

What’s essential are passion, commitment, vision, and a willingness to take on challenges.

You can categorize transformation in three ways, each with their own pros and cons:

Top-down
Middle
Bottom-up

Leading from the top down

Set a strong vision and goals aligned to it
Remove impediments
Change incentives
Connect and coordinate
Mange relationships up and across
Assume all risk

Mitigating the problem of distance

Set up feedback loops
Walk around
Encourage fast escalation … nuclear option
Manage through Big Hairy Audacious Goals

Leading from the middle

Do what is possible within scope of influence
Free up resource from prototyping/POCs/reference architectures
Create a skunkworks (don’t be sneaky)
Get small wins constantly
Forge alliances
Sell up and across

Leading from the bottom up

Go ahead and make changes
Start small and work incrementally
Use changes to improve your own productivity
Create concrete benefits (e.g., reduce deployment errors)
Lower risk my banking it clear you are invested in POCs
Find collaborators, and share good practices

How to sell

Know what you’re asking for
Frame your idea in terms of how they will lead to successes
Provide actual evidence (like a POC)
Mitigate risk for the “buyer”
Think carefully about the language you use

What do executives want?

They do not care about sprints, backlogs, microservices, technical debt, or even the cloud.

They do care about revenues, costs, risks, competitive positioning.

Today’s big concerns:

Have a growth story (revenue)
Be future-ready to avoid disruption
Mange today’s risks (compliance, security, etc)
Unlock the value in their databases

Wrap Up

You can transform and you can do it today — stop making excuses. Change can be driven from anywhere in your organization. It always involves influencing other people.

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High Performance Team on Andrew Khoury

Driving change and building a high-performance DevOps culture

What I learnt (My Notes)

Driving change and building a high-performance DevOps culture (DOP207)