The late business management guru Peter Drucker coined the phrase, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” and the phrase has endured through the years. Your people must be passionate and enthusiastic about executing business strategy, or it – and your business – is doomed to fail. But remember that company culture itself needs a strategy to complement the business.
DevOps, too, will not succeed without the right culture. As I said in my book “Engineering DevOps,” “Culture is a door to Engineering DevOps,” because if leaders and people do not work in accordance with DevOps principles, then no tool or engineering process will be sufficient to succeed with DevOps. In my (and others’) experience, culture challenges are the No. 1 obstacle that many organizations need to overcome to succeed with DevOps. But changing culture is not easy. Values, beliefs, behaviors and work habits are deeply ingrained in organizations. Organizational inertia and deep-rooted habits are much harder to change than tools or process changes. Transforming organizational culture for success with DevOps requires a strategy, goals and sustained commitment.
In her article, “5 Steps to Change Your Company Culture,” Kate Heinz prescribes five practical steps for cultural change which also are highly applicable to DevOps culture transformation.
Step 1: Determine Core Values
Start by clarifying the values that are most important to accomplishing the long-term strategic goals of the organization. With DevOps, typical strategic core values could be responsiveness to customer needs, speed of innovation, technology leadership and software products and services resiliency, for example. Collaborate with all the key stakeholders including executives, long-term employees, sales teams, key suppliers and HR to obtain alignment on core values before executing the next steps.
Step 2: Set Your Culture Goals
In his article, “7 Key Principles for a Successful DevOps Culture,” Kaya Ismail identified seven principles that can form a framework for determining your DevOps culture goals.
1. Foster a Collaborative Environment – Break down silos to bring people, processes and tools towards a unified focus on the customer.
2. End-to-End Responsibility – All people in the value stream need to be fully accountable for the application and outcomes from beginning to end.
3. Encourage Continuous Improvement – Optimize value streams using integration toolchains and automated processes to realize quick lead times and fast customer feedback to continuously improve performance.
4. Automate Almost Everything – Automated CI/CD processes, infrastructure provisioning, testing, deployment and security compliance require a skilled workforce.
5. Focus on Customer Needs – DevOps teams must continuously pay close attention to ever-changing consumer demands and be ready to respond quickly.
6. Embrace Failure and Learn – A “climate for learning” in which failures are viewed as opportunities to learn makes people feel safe and empowered to transform their work.
7. Unite Teams and Expertise – The scope and complexity of DevOps requires team members to share knowledge and cross-train so they are well-rounded and have a balanced set of skills.
Step 3: Assess Your Existing Culture
Conduct interviews and surveys with employees and key stakeholders to determine where there are deviances from the culture goals set in Step 2. Communicate an analysis of the assessment findings to all stakeholders, pointing out important gaps, areas for improvement and the general plan to close the gaps.
Step 4: Map Out the Plan
Develop a roadmap to address the gaps identified in Step 3. Include specific tasks, timelines, benchmarks and responsibilities. Tasks and items may include targeted workshops, training, selective new hires, organizational changes and, most importantly, rewards and consequences – the real drivers of behavior and culture. One caution about training: as Thane Bellomo explained in his article, “Training Doesn’t Change Culture,” training alone does not have the power to fundamentally change culture.
Step 5: Evaluate Your Progress
Communication, surveys and interviews are important so individuals can provide feedback and track progress. Use the feedback you receive to verify that culture goals are being improved upon, and to reinforce to everyone that the culture changes are important. Use DevOps metrics such as lead time, release frequency and time-to-restore service to demonstrate that the culture changes are helping the organization achieve the strategic values set in Step 1. As you monitor progress, be mindful of pitfalls. As Larry Senn explained, “The Top 4 Reasons Culture Change Initiatives Fail” are: lack of consistent leadership from top management, inadequate personal involvement, disconnected initiatives and lack of top-to-bottom momentum. Be prepared to make corrections based on the evaluations to ensure your culture transformation stays true to your DevOps strategic values and culture goals.
What This All Means
Success with DevOps requires the right kind of culture. Changing culture is no small feat, but it can be done if approached strategically. The five steps described in this article provide a framework for organizational culture change that supports DevOps.
