People and processes spend more time, but are more important than any technology in solving business problems.
Today, many IT professionals are struggling to adapt to change and disruption. It can be said that you are trying to keep the lights on? Are you overwhelmed? This is not uncommon. Today, the status quo is not enough, so IT departments are constantly trying to re-invent themselves.
With more than 30 years of comprehensive IT experience, we have witnessed the importance of people and relationships to IT's effective capabilities and business development. However, most of the time, our conversations about IT solutions start with technology, not people and processes. The tendency to find answers to business and IT challenges is too common. However, you cannot buy innovation, DevOps, or effective teams and ways of working; they need to be nurtured, supported, and guided.
Disruption is so common, and the need for speed of change is so urgent, we need discipline and guardrails. The five basic values of DevOps mindset described below will support the practices that enable us to achieve our goals. These values are not new ideas. Learned their reconstruction from our experience. Some of these values can be interchanged or used flexibly, and they guide the general principles that support (such as pillars) these five values.
1. Stakeholder feedback is crucial
How do we know whether the value we create for us is greater than that of stakeholders? We need continuous quality data to analyze, provide information and make better decisions. Relevant information from trusted sources is essential for any business to thrive. We need to listen and understand what stakeholders are saying rather than what they are saying, we need to implement changes in a way that allows us to adjust our thinking, processes, and technology, and make adjustments as needed to satisfy our stakeholders. Because the information (data) is incorrect, we often see few changes, or many changes due to errors. Therefore, aligning changes with stakeholder feedback is a fundamental value and helps us focus on the most important factors that make the company successful.
Focus on our stakeholders and their feedback, rather than just change for the sake of change.
2. Improve beyond the limits of today's processes
We hope that our products and services will continue to satisfy customers (our most important stakeholders), so we need to continuously improve. This is not only related to quality; it can also mean cost, availability, relevance, and many other goals and factors. Creating repeatable processes or leveraging common frameworks is great-they can improve governance and many other issues-but this should not be our ultimate goal. When looking for ways to improve, we must adjust the process and supplement it with the right technology and tools. There may be reasons to throw out a "so-called" framework, because not doing so may increase waste, or worse, just "shipping" (doing something with no value or purpose).
Strive to always innovate and improve beyond repeatable processes and frameworks.
3. There is no new silo to disassemble the silo
Silo and DevOps are not compatible. We have been seeing this situation: an IT director hired a so-called "expert" to implement agile and DevOps, what will they do? These "experts" created a new problem on the basis of an existing problem, which is another island added by the IT department and a company full of islands. Creating the "DevOps" title goes against the principles of agile and DevOps based on the concept of breaking islands. In both agile and DevOps, teamwork is essential. If you do not participate in the work of self-organizing teams, you will not do both.
Inspire and share with each other instead of being heroes or creating silos.
4. Knowing the customer means inter-organizational collaboration
No part of the business is an independent entity, because they all have stakeholders, and the main stakeholders are always customers. "The customer is always right" (or the king as I call it). The key is that without customers, there is no business. To maintain today's business, we need to "distinguish" from our competitors. We also need to know how our customers feel about us and what they want from us. Understanding customer needs is a top priority, and timely feedback is needed to ensure that companies can quickly and responsibly resolve the needs and concerns of these major stakeholders.
Whether it comes from ideas, concepts, assumptions or direct feedback from stakeholders, we all need to use the exploration, construction, testing, and delivery lifecycle to determine and measure the features or services delivered by the product. Fundamentally, this means that we need to "plug in" our organization throughout the organization. Continuous innovation, learning and DevOps are borderless. Therefore, when we measure across the enterprise, we can understand the whole and take feasible and meaningful steps to improve.
Measure the performance of the entire organization, not just the scope of the business.
5. Stimulate adoption through passion
Not everyone is driven to learn, adapt and change. But just as smiles can be contagious, so can learning and wanting to be part of a culture of change. Adaptation and development in the learning culture provide a natural mechanism for a group of people to learn and transmit information (ie, cultural transmission). Learning styles, attitudes, methods and processes are constantly evolving, so we can improve them. The next step is to apply the knowledge learned and improved, and share information with colleagues. Learning does not happen automatically. It requires effort, evaluation, discipline, awareness, and especially communication; unfortunately, these are things that tools and automation cannot provide. View your process, automation, tool strategy and implementation work to make it transparent,
Promote a learning culture through lean quality deliverables, not just tools and automation.
As our company adopts DevOps, we will continue to promote these five values in any book, website or automation software. It takes time to adopt this way of thinking, which is very different from what we did as sysadmins before. This is a completely new way of working, and it will take many years to mature. Are these principles consistent with your own principles? Share them in the comments or on our website (chaotic agency) .