There is quite a bit of conversation about tools versus culture, and sometimes, those constantly involved in the back-and-forth forget that not everyone is so steeped in the finer points of the conversation.
Tools is the easy part. There are a ton of tools available to optimize IT operations, from small bespoke products such as the Antsle Private Cloud Server to CA’s broad suite of Dev/Test/DevOps/ARA tools. There are plenty of places to find lists or charts of tools, and I’ll leave you to them, just mentioning the two I’ve written about in the not-too-distant past: Xebia Labs’ Periodic Table of DevOps, and CA/Automic’s Continuous Delivery Landscape.
But what of culture? When pundits and old hands talk of culture, what exactly are they talking about?
Well, it still varies a bit from organization to organization, but there are some definite underlying foundations.
Increased Cross-Team Communications
Even if an org is full-on DevOps, there is still the requirement of cross-team communications to make sure everyone understands what is going on.
One of the things that this does not make abundantly clear, I will belabor a bit (sorry, old hands). Communications is not just talking. It is not just email exchanges, it is not just sitting in another team’s meetings while researching your current problem on your phone.
It can be these things, but it is a breadth of options. People are using Slack channels to keep everyone updated, common notifications or even pub-sub systems to make certain information about the state of IT, operations and builds are getting wide distribution. Increase communication, not chatter.
Organizational Change
You hear that a lot, and it can mean complete overhaul of an IT organization, but in an enterprise setting, it rarely does. The reason is simple. There may only be one or two Cisco specialists, or one or two EMC specialists, and these people don’t properly belong on one or two product/project teams in the long term. The same goes for security and a whole further swath of operations team members.
So in the enterprise, what “organizational change” often means is moving those responsible for development and core deployment closer together on small, product- or portfolio-based teams. Networking staff, security staff and infrastructure staff will join the teams as needed, but are not part of the core team.
Management Change
This is another often spoken-of mantra that easily can be misunderstood. In short, managing a small, agile, entire product lifecycle team is not the same as managing a pool of resources that pop from project to project and are either (a) not involved in the operations portion at all, or (b) not involved in the development portion at all.
For a great set of perspectives on this topic, I’ll recommend our partner The DevOps Institute. It has an eBook and a certification course (DevOps Leader) on this topic.
Decentralization, Yet Increased Oversight
This is often a confusing pair of messages we send when talking about what DevOps culture change does. It really is not that complex—pundits just assume everyone already knows, and, honestly, those knee-deep in DevOps do know.
Decentralization, as taught in the DevOps Leader course mentioned above, is about driving as much decision-making as possible down to the team. When teams are built around a product or group of products, then those with the most pertinent information about what is best for the product quite often can be made within the team, speeding decision-making and implementation.
Increased oversight is an acknowledgement of two things. First, there is more information available in an agile environment, and that information is available more frequently. Standup meetings offer some, while milestones offer other data. Second, tools are starting to allow rollup of information in a uniform fashion for CIOs, CTOs and business leaders to look at. This means they can quickly see the status of projects they have a vested interest in and provide feedback into the process. To go from, “Oh, this roadmap item is going to take a lot more work than we thought,” to, “Great, we have a plan, let’s keep moving,” is shorter when there is more information available to the decision-makers on both the business side and the IT side.
There is no doubt plenty I have missed, but these seem to be the core things that those of us discussing this topic a lot assume others know, and that those just looking into DevOps really don’t. Hopefully it will help someone push through the clutter and come to a decision on DevOps in general, or culture changes in particular.
