Agile & Entrepreneurship Meetup - Part 2: Seán Finlay

Agile & Entrepreneurship Meetup - Part 2: Seán Finlay

DevOps requires a culture shift and it's about people.

DevOps is indeed taking hold and Seán Finlay told us about how he sees it fitting into some organisations better than others.

This is part 2 you can find part 1 here: Agile & Entrepreneurship Meetup – Part 1: Jeff Gothelf

Sean Finlay

Seán Finlay

DevOps: taking hold

This was a solid introduction to what DevOps is, and what it means for an organization.  It wasn’t deeply technical, but neither was the audience.  Some of the takeaways from this talk that I thought had significant value were:

  • Driven by rapid delivery and delights customers faster, better, cheaper
  • The underpinnings to make it work are:
    • Cultural shift
    • Lean/agile learnings
    • Automation
    • Collaboration
    • Cloud (Really this is more a tool that enables infrastructure deployment for smaller organisations)
  • One wouldn’t design a new business with a siloed organizational structure now
  • High performing organisations raise profits (puppet labs state of DevOps slide)
  • Focus on people first
  • Assess who you are and where you are
  • There are three type of organizations Pathological, Bureaucratic, and Generative (figure to the right).  The Generative type of organisation it the one most capable of implementing DevOps properly
  • You have to fix the organisation for devops to work
  • Zero downtime upgrades are a major benefit allowing more frequent deployments including multiple times per day
  • Empower the team  and create some early wins, this builds momentum and gets buy in from within the team and from around the organisation.

Ron Westrum's Type of Organisations

Ron Westrum's Type of Organisations

So I would say from both of these talks the most important thing if you want to move towards DevOps, then your culture and your people are what will make it work. There are lots of tools to enable DevOps processes, but they won’t make an organisation with the wrong culture work any better.

Let me know what you think, or if you have any questions.

~ Dave

<~ Agile & Entrepreneurship Meetup - Part 1: Jeff Gothelf | And now for something new... ~>