The term DevOps has been around for many years already (remember the Phoenix Project an excellent book inspired by Gene Kim?) but I am astounded that there is still a lack of understanding at the management level about what this is. It is true that Amazons and Googles do it and the potential benefits are huge. But you can’t just hire a set of DevOps engineers/contractors and tag them onto your existing teams and then pick up some cool tools like Puppet, Docker and Jenkins and be done with it. DevOps is a philosophy and a change in mindset. It is a massive change and transformation exercise which requires strong leadership and experienced heads to drive changes in habits, thinking and behaviour. There are NEVER any shortcuts in the world of change and transformation and there will be pain as people learn the new way of doing things. No pain, No gain.
How can I understand what DevOps is?
It was a privilege to be invited by Jaro Tomik to attend Imperial College to review the G2G3 DevOps simulation experience. This was a very unique training workshop, which allows attendees to experience first hand what it is like to transition from a chaotic immature state to highly optimized DevOps future state. Over 20 participants were split into several teams, the Business, IT Development, QA, IT Operations, Service Desk and we had to work together to keep the business running under a surprising amount of simulated pressure! The gamification of the learning experience, created a real motivation to pull together as a team in an effort to win the game by meeting the business targets. For me the most important take away was the power of a visible Business Scorecard, and the advantages of having a well designed set of business metrics as a motivator for breaking down the traditional silos between the business and IT (see below). It was the first time I had experienced the David Kolb method of “learning by doing” but it was a thoroughly engaging, informative and fun experience, recommended for IT and Business Leaders.#
For more information about G2G3 and the Digital Transformation simulations available: https://lnkd.in/d9znJk2. Thanks to Jaro Tomik for inviting me to review this!
