Culture is critically important in an organisation. It’s all of the hidden stuff that actually matters. It’s what people value and it feeds through to how people behave when you aren’t watching them, driving thousands of small decisions per day across the enterprise. A broken culture is a horrible thing to work within and a really tough thing to change because it is so inherent to an organisations DNA.
I also believe that DevOps is fundamentally a culture. If people aren’t approaching IT delivery in a collaborative, emphatic way with a focus on continuous improvement then it probably won’t happen despite all of the change initiatives in the world.
On the flip side, we can have the slowest, most beuracractic, most legacy technology environment, but the right culture will usually transcend all of that and make good DevOps like ways of working happen.
With all of this said, I really dislike the term ‘DevOps Culture’. Nothing tends to get me ranting more in the DevOps arena than hearing that phrase.
Why? Because it is so inactionable.
I speak with a lot of enterprises who are looking to adopt DevOps. Once they have decided to get started, the first question is ‘What Shall We Do First?’ If I was to say, ‘DevOps is about a culture and about people having empathy with one another’. They would say ‘Great how do we achieve it? What do we do tomorrow, next week, next month?’
At this point, some people scratch their heads. In the past I’ve heard, ‘buy dev and ops a pizza or some beers – thats a good first step. Maybe try a rotation or two and the culture will develop.’
Personally, I don’t think that will cut it in a 10,000 person globally distributed IT function. The pizza bill alone would bring down the organisation.
Moving Towards A DevOps Culture
Culture is very hard to influence directly, it’s emergent from much more concrete activities.
The meat of the discussion needs to lie there – in the steps we perform to get the outcomes we want. Things like:
- Moving to cross functional teams
- Cross training or hiring people with polyglot skillsets
- Giving people the same incentives across the IT function
- Empowering people to self optimise their processes and the end to delivery lifecycle
- Encouraging people towards cross-silo collaboration over being tied to a rigid process
- Changing reporting lines in the business
- Investing in optimising the path to production over new features
- Training and coaching developers, testers and IT operations on new collaborative ways of working
- Bringing in new tools to support collaboration across siloes
- ….. & 1000 other concrete activities
To me, roadmaps of the activities above and the challenges and subtleties involved in doing them are much more useful than a nebulous statement about DevOps being a culture. I can actually do something with these!
DevOps needs a much more rigorous approach to achieving it within the enterprise. We need to be develop out all of the steps above and bringing the conversation down to earth. Only when we get to this level of detail will we actually succeed in moving the dial to a DevOps culture.
I think I’d like to you to expand on why you hate the term. Is it that people don’t get that culture, like many things, is an emergent property? And does this annoy you?
If I were your client, I’d be delighted if I said, ‘it’s all culture, isn’t it’? And you said, ‘well, culture emerges from these actions’, and then went onto list loads of concrete actions.
‘Hate’ and ‘annoy’ are a bit stronger than I feel – I went with ‘dislike’ 🙂
My frustration is aimed back at the ‘DevOps community’. I think it’s us that needs to have a more rigorous answer and bring the conversation down to earth towards things that people can actually implement.
I think this is important because I want to see DevOps succeed. I want to see it come out of conference rooms and working groups and into real initiatives. The issue however is that the mainstream still can’t always get a handle on it – the definition and the steps are too nebulous and high-brow and we are all at fault for that.
I have the conversation you stated above all of the time with customers. Indeed, we have built this roadmap which works well for us and our clients. I would however love to see this thinking repeated across industry so DevOps can reach a wider audience.
“My frustration is aimed back at the ‘DevOps community’. I think it’s us that needs to have a more rigorous answer and bring the conversation down to earth towards things that people can actually implement.” – Ah! Now I understand.
People in software always reject or don’t know what came before them. There are loads of tools, techniques, etc, that can be used to change a culture. They are concrete, down to earth, and provide guidance without relegating human needs to ‘just fluff’. This is my competitive advantage – I read stuff that the snobs in software would dismiss as management bullshit.
PS, for another way of wording the argument, perhaps these guys say it better:
https://opensource.com/business/15/2/devops-culture-needs-be-created
“If we’re using “culture” as a shorthand for the large number of factors that result in culture, we’re “only” being imprecise. But it’s more than a semantic quibble because it can distract us from focusing on actionable steps such as creating the right organizational structure, properly aligning incentives, and—yes—putting appropriate tooling in place.”
I see culture as a shared language, behaviors and norms. While it is not directly actionable you can change the language and behaviors and shift the norms. For me a DevOps culture is my success criteria and the result of change and not a lever to affect change.
I don’t know why we think that just because something is an emergent property of a system steps can’t be taken to manifest it.
The emergent property of winning the FA Cup is a result of lots and lots of actions.
Personally I don’t care about DevOps culture or DevOps for that matter – I do care about human working and business success, however.