Everything You Need to Know About DevOps, You Learned in

Kindergarten

Congratulations on becoming a DevOps newbie!

You’re just back from a DevOps conference, and you’re charged up to bring the DevOps revolution to your own organization.

But there’s a problem.

Back at the office, you hit a brick wall.

Folks listen politely, but you suspect they’re just paying lip-service. Your suggestions are greeted with stony silence. You’re scolded for offering “unworkable” ideas.

They treat you like a small child …

After all, DevOps itself is only five years old.

Many people don’t think DevOps is mature enough for the Enterprise …

But DevOps has good parents and strong “Genes” …

So, at five years old, DevOps is ready for school ...

… and five things you learned in kindergarten can help you bring DevOps to your own organization.

1. Invite people to play with you.

You don’t have to wait for the next DevOps conference to convince like-minded colleagues on the value of DevOps—you can start your own.

Develop internal mini-conferences or cross-team hacks.

Crash the next Agile stand-up meeting. Invite yourself.

2. Play nicely with others.

You most likely work in a “multi-cultural” setting, with established best practices like ITIL, COBIT, CMMI and balanced scorecard.

Don’t fight them. At best, you’ll just make people mad. At worst, you’ll be on your way to establishing a separate, siloed thought practice.

Strive for collaboration and co-existence.

3. Share your toys.

We’re taught to share our toys at an early age, so why do we crave ownership of our toolsets in the workplace?

Look for ways to open your tools to others, leverage the tools of others in a DevOps-friendly way or put newer cross-functional and collaborative tools in place.

4. Use your inside voice.

Terms like Minimum Viable Product, Failing Fast and Technical Debt might connote something really bad and unpalatable to business users.

Moderate DevOps jargon by demonstrating value with user-centric stories. Use words your colleagues can understand to explain your points.

5. Show off your gold stars.

Celebrate the small wins. Don’t get carried away with impressive-sounding metrics, like time to value and market share.Look for performance indicators that drive change and incentivize behavior, especially those that can be shared across teams:• Service quality

(e.g. deployment success rates)• Service velocity

(e.g. deployment frequency/cycle times• Customer value

(e.g. response times, lead times and net promoter scores).

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