In this DevOps Chat we speak with Rob England, the IT Skeptic. Rob joins us from New Zealand (you have to love the internet). Rob is going to speak at this year’s DevOps Enterprise Summit London, June 5-6, about the importance of taking care of your people in the DevOps transformation process. Rob is always an entertaining fellow and this chat is no different. If you are attending DOES London this year, you don’t want to miss his session!
As usual, the streaming media of our conversation is immediately below and the transcript of our chat follows that:
Transcript of the Chat
Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone. This is Alan Shimel from staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud here for another DevOps Chat. We’re lucky to be joined on this DevOps Chat by a friend of mine and a person who’s actually appeared before on our DevOps Chat, all the way from New Zealand: Rob England, the IT Skeptic. Rob, welcome to DevOps Chat.
Rob England: Hi, Alan, and, hi, everybody. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Shimel: So, you know, Rob, actually, I didn’t ask, but are you back home in New Zealand right now?
England: I am, so I’m about to have my breakfast. [Laughs]
Shimel: Okay.
England: Tomorrow. Your tomorrow. So –
Shimel: Yep, it’s my tomorrow. You’re already living my tomorrow—that’s interesting. So, Rob, of course, I think you’re well known within the DevOps community and the IT community at large, but, for anyone who’s listening may not be familiar, why don’t you give us a quick little background?
England: Okay, thank you. Yeah, so I come from a service management background, so I have a bit of a presence internationally with a small blog that got a service management following, so that’s how I sort of became internationally networked. And, originally, I was a bit of a skeptic of the whole DevOps thing, but I was gradually turned, by Gene Kim and by John Willis and by Jez Humble and others, into a bit of an enthusiast, and now my whole life is DevOps, really. I consult here in Wellington, New Zealand to the DevOps community and I’m working with a couple of the largest government departments here in New Zealand now, helping them on their DevOps journey.
Shimel: That’s just great. And, Rob, you’re traveling from New Zealand to London, June 5th and 6th, for this year’s DevOps Enterprise Summit, DOES London. It’s at the –
England: I am.
Shimel: – QEII Conference Center. And you’ll be speaking there as well.
England: I am. Oh, I’m really, really pleased and honored to be selected to speak; I think that’s fantastic.
Shimel: I think it is too. So, Rob, we’re lucky enough to interview a few other speakers from DOES—not only from London but in past DOES events in San Francisco, but can you give our audience a little bit of a flavor for what it’s like or what’s the process like or what motivates one to go speak at a DOES event?
England: [Chuckles] Oh, in this case, what motivated me was Gene Kim, so I was talking to him about some of the people stuff that I’m quite passionate about, and he said, “Hey, you should write that up and submit it,” so I did. And, from there, it was pretty straightforward—I put all the details in and had my proposal accepted—so that’s very exciting. As I say, I’m very passionate about the people side of things and the cultural change, and the focus for this presentation is around taking care of our people through that transformation.
Shimel: Excellent. And so, Rob, when you mention people like that, I’m reminded or brought back to a—I think it was Adrian Cockcroft’s presentation in San Francisco this past—don’t remember if it was October or November, but you may remember. And Adrian’s presentation was very much that,“Hey, people are your most valuable asset and you gotta treat them right. And, when you think about the money you spend on tools and all of these other things, it pales in comparison to the importance of spending money on people.”
England: Yeah. Absolutely. In the past, even before my DevOps life, I used to write about how, if you look at any project, when we’ve had projects, and how the money was allocated within that project, if it wasn’t sort of one-third people, one-third process, one-third tools, then you had a very strong indicator it wasn’t gonna be a successful project.
Shimel: Mm-hmm. Repeat that again, though, ’cause you know how you New Zealanders are – you talk so fast. [Chuckles] That it was one-third, one-third, one-third?
England: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one-third people, one-third practices, one-third tools. If it’s not something like that, it’s very typical to see project proposals that are going to spend 50 percent of their money on installing the tools and 50 percent of their money on redesigning their processes—oh, and, by the way, there’s a day’s training. You know, and it’s like, well, there’s nothing else recognizably about workshopping with people or collaborating with people or, you know, coaching people or all the other people aspects. It’s very common to see projects that are not planning to spend any money on all that, and I think that’s a –
Shimel: I agree.
England: – a formula for failure, right?
Shimel: Yeah, no, it is. I mean, we tend to take the people part of it for granted, and, just as you said, you don’t spend the money on it, will spend a ton of money on tools and infrastructure. Right?
England: And I have to say, I think that’s one of the two primary reasons why service management initiatives were so often unsuccessful, was that, I thought, didn’t coach us enough to focus on the culture and the transformation, and we spent too much time on process, so DevOps—for me, the power of DevOps or a big part of its power is it’s focused on people and culture.
Shimel: I have to agree with you. I have to—you know, Rob, I’m reminded of, back in my security days, the co-founder of StillSecure, I went to visit a rather large bank out in New York, and it was about vulnerability management. And we were talking about the vulnerability management program they had in place and I mentioned to ’em that the way they were doing things, it was forcing his security team not only just to scan at night, which is, you know, normal, but to actually only do remediations on weekends.
England: Mm-hmm.
Shimel: And I said, “You know, that means that your security team is working every weekend, in addition to working during the week, ’cause you don’t have enough people to stagger that.” And he said, “I don’t care. I pay them by the week; I don’t pay them by the hour. I don’t care if they work seven days a week.” And that –
England: There’s a good boss, eh?
Shimel: Yeah, no, that’s someone you’d wanna work for, right? But this, unfortunately—you know, we talk about culture and the whole “Kumbaya” thing that many people kinda try to say with DevOps, but it’s real. You gotta treat your people as your greatest asset, and that was Adrian’s message, right, at DOES San Francisco. They’re not –
England: That’s powerful.
Shimel: Yeah. And they—if you treat ’em like crap, crap is what you’re gonna get, I’m afraid.
England: Absolutely. And my particular focus for this presentation is about the effect of the transition on people in your organization and, in particular, there’s this “Get on the bus” thing, but we don’t wanna actually throw people under the bus, so it’s giving people the opportunity and the time to grow and to make the transition. There’s very often a “revolution, not evolution” thinking in management’s mind: “Are we just going to change everything?” And, again, we’re very neglectful of the fact—the old bell curve—we’re very neglectful of the fact that just because a few people are coming along doesn’t mean we—we still have to allocate more time for the great masses to get their head around this thing and absorb some of these really quite challenging and radical concepts that underpin Agile and DevOps—it does people’s heads in, as we say down here.
Shimel: Yeah. So, Rob, let’s talk about that a little bit, if we can. You know, you’ve now consulted, as you said, with a bunch of government departments and companies, both in New Zealand and in other parts of the world. What, from a people point of view, what is the hardest things that these guys or these people have to kinda wrap their heads around to make it successful?
England: Oh, I’m sure the biggest challenge is getting—well, actually, one of the biggest challenges is getting away from that silo-ed thinking, and so the other power of DevOps, along with its focus on people, is its focus on systems and systems theory and systems thinking. And so I think that they struggle to get out of their silo and start thinking holistically and seeing the whole flow of value and understanding their role in that. That is a big challenge to just about everybody.
Shimel: Agreed.
England: Then there’s also—yeah. And then there’s also peculiar challenges to each organization as well, right? So I’m thinking of one where a particularly psychopathic CIO had moved on, and it was trying to teach people that, “It’s okay now. You can come out from under your rocks, you know? It’s gone.” So that’s –
Shimel: “Out from under your rocks.”
England: Yeah. That’s a—they all sort of crawled away into shelter, you know? And so that’s the peculiar problem in one situation. So there’s—you know, every place has its own challenges, but a universal one is that siloed thinking and another universal one is just the letting go of the—do you remember the Bastard Operator from Hell, BOFH, or –
Shimel: Mm-hmm.
England: – or Dilbert‘s Wally? You know, these characters that—it’s considered funny in IT that people have dysfunctional behaviors and are misanthropic, and part of the DevOps message is just we don’t tolerate that anymore. That negativity is not allowed—we just don’t tolerate it—and getting rid of some of that old cynical bitter and twisted IT thinking is also a common challenge.
Shimel: I agree. I agree. And you know what? I think part of it is not only the negativity from whether it be a supervisor or peer; I think the other biggest thing that I personally see and when I talk to organizations around DevOps and stuff, and not just dev and ops—when I talk with QA and security and management and so forth—is the finger-pointing, is the—it’s almost like American politics, I’m sorry to say, in that “Yeah, I know this is screwed up, but blame the other guy,” or “If you think this is screwed up, you should see how screwed up the other guy is.”
England: Absolutely.
Shimel: You know? “And it’s not my fault; I inherited a mess,” and all of this kind of thing where one of the refreshing things about DevOps is it started with the blameless postmortem, but it’s more than just a blameless postmortem—it’s about “Stop pointing the finger and let’s work on solving this together, instead of just saying, ‘Hey, it’s this mate’s fault and it’s his problem.’”
England: “I’ve got your back.”
Shimel: Yep. I mean, and that –
England: I’ve got your back, buddy.”
Shimel: You know, and that may sound hokey and “Kumbaya-ry” and all that, but, really, I think that’s when you start building a team.
England: There’s a really good cartoon, that might be a Paul Wilkinson one, where the ops guys are at one end of the boat, looking down at the dev guys at the other end of the boat, trying to deal with a fountain of water and saying, “Not my problem, not my end of the boat.”
Shimel: Right. Uh-huh. Exactly. And we’re all on the same boat, though. So –
England: Yeah. Yeah.
Shimel: So this is a real thing. Rob, other than DOES, have you been talking about this kind of subject at other events and so forth?
England: Oh, for sure. So, actually, it’s been an interest of mine since before I was consulting. I used to work in—for my sins, for a vendor, and I used to do work on professional development there and trying not to let the technical people fall under the bus and trying to get them to skill up to be consultants, rather than just product jockeys. So I’ve worked and talked in this field for a long time, just as a personal passion. I hate to see good people lost, you know, just because their organization failed to make sure they were coming along and to take care of them.
Shimel: Sure. Sure.
England: So that’s a long-term passion, but this particular topic now I’m hatching especially for DOES, to put together a presentation specifically about the DevOps implications of—it’s called “Surviving DevOps,” so making sure everybody’s—it’s not just that you individually survive, but that “no person left behind,” you know, as well.
Shimel: I agree with you. So, Rob, geez, I’ve met you—wasn’t this year’s San Francisco DOES; it was last year’s. So it wasn’t 2016; it was 2015 DOES San Francisco. And we’ve, of course, seen each other several times since, but –
England: And, you know, I’m one of the few people in the world who’s been to every single DOES in both the U.S. and the UK.
Shimel: So I think I’m one of them too, actually, but –
England: Yep, you would be.
Shimel: Yeah, which is interesting, when you think about it that way. But let’s—I mean, many in our audience may not have been lucky enough to even get to one, let alone five or six of these things. Can you give our audience a flavor of why? Why do you keep coming back? Why did you feel compelled to wanna speak at this one? What makes this a great event in your mind?
England: Well, I think it’s the fount of knowledge for DevOps, especially DevOps enterprise, so my interest is DevOps for hoses, not DevOps for unicorns. And, very much, the focus of the enterprise conference is around DevOps in the real world, DevOps in the enterprise world, so that’s the first thing. The second thing is that Gene does a fantastic job of focusing and coaching presenters to make sure that their presentations are really short and pithy and full of value, and they also make sure that the presenters are practitioners, so there’s not a lot of talking heads, except for some really high-value experts like John Willis and Jez Humble and Adrian Cockcroft, the people who are up there purely because of their intellectual strengths. But most of the speakers are there because they’re reporting back from the coalface about their own experiences and learnings, and so that, to me, is gold.
Shimel: Yes. Any—well, I guess that kinda says it all, Rob. If anyone had any doubts about whether they’d wanna go to this or not, that clears that up. Rob, anything else happening exciting around DevOps you think people should be on the lookout for?
England: Oh, well, I’m not sure about _____ – the value for me is that I live on the last rock on the planet, so I actually get quite a different lens on DevOps than perhaps those, like yourself, immersed in the big economies and big societies, and, certainly, it’s going gangbusters here. There’s a huge wave of interest in the mainstream—in government, in the airline, the banks—and I’m gathering that that’s not necessarily the case everywhere in the world, so, you know, I think that –
Shimel: No, I think it is. I really think it is.
England: Yeah. Yeah. But they’re not just dabbling anymore, right? They’re actually transforming; they’re restructuring the way they go. And, to me, that’s the excitement of the moment, is that this thing is mainstream. You know, it’s bridged the chasm. Remember the Star Wars book about crossing the chasm? You know, the –
Shimel: Yeah. Sure do.
England: – DevOps has gone from the early adopters to mainstream now. It’s definitely –
Shimel: Oh, it’s certainly mainstream, but I –
England: – the majority.
Shimel: So I think it’s in the early majority, though, not the later majority.
England: That’s true. That’s true. It’s still not everyone; it’s still not—but, yeah, but it’s certainly jumped—it’s certainly bridged the chasm and it’s on its way up that curve.
Shimel: Oh, no doubt about that. No doubt about it and, hey, we live it every day here at staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud, as we continue to kind of chronicle all this. Anyway, Rob, we’re about out of time. I wanna thank you for joining us all the way from New Zealand. Look forward to seeing you in London and your presentation and thanks for doing everything you do, Rob. I mean, you know, you’re a healthy IT skeptic. In IT, skepticism is healthy, right?
England: It sure is and I love doing it. Thanks, Alan. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, my friend.
Shimel: All right, Rob. You be well. We’ll see you in just a couple—well, it’s about two months now, probably.
England: See you there.
Shimel: All right. Rob England, IT Skeptic, speaker at DOES London on June 5th and 6th at QE Conference Center. This is Alan Shimel for DevOps Chat. We’ll see you soon on the next DevOps Chat.
