Winston Churchill once said, “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” While nearly everyone will confess that change is necessary to grow and succeed, we all know it’s much harder, especially when human behavior is involved. Professionals who work in DevOps environments know this all too well.
Adoption of DevOps principles and behaviors should be viewed as a gradual process. Many organizations make false starts or attempt to implement a change only to see it fail. Sometimes this is due to changes in leadership, market conditions or technology, but then organizations catch their second wind, build momentum and reaccelerate their evolution.
DevOps can Change
With a shared vision, mutual goals and hard work, DevOps can change to keep up with user demands. DevOps professionals will always confront two potent barriers: Cultural and process debt and technical debt.
Cultural and process debt occurs when leaders refuse to delegate authority, distrust their teams and lack a value stream approach to work. Technical debt develops when monolithic systems are tightly coupled, automation is delayed for testing, environments and version control and there is no access to cloud technologies.
Although these obstacles are challenging and complicated, many organizations still meet them head-on. Evolution depends on a habit of making improvements every day through the use of an improvement kata such as PDCA (plan, do, check, act), which involves long-term strategies and objectives and continual experiments between the current and next target states.
An evolving DevOps approach maintains moving pieces across a large organization of hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of people who cannot change overnight. Many lack the will and the cognitive capacity to embrace and enact change.
This environment requires release managers to delegate power and transition from centralized commander to an enabler, understanding different value streams have varied skills and requirements. Mark Peters, a cybersecurity specialist and DevOps leader with years of military operations experience, outlined his top release management traits in the context of DevOps ways of working as automated processes, distributed accountability and accelerated delivery.
PDCA Improvement Kata
DevOps proposes that we adopt an improvement kata in our day-to-day efforts as an improvement habit, consisting of four steps that are repeated:
1. Set the long-term vision
2. Understand the current state
3. Identify the next target state
4. PDCA between the states
Experimentation is at the heart of the PDCA cycle. The most practical experiments are empirical, data-driven and date-specific. Using a value stream management platform to give data to support the experiments leads to data-driven discussions on real and measurable success.
In the next part of this series, we will begin exploring different experiments DevOps organizations can conduct to drive change and improve their release management procedures.
