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The State of DevOps

There was a great media event during DevOps World | Jenkins World hosted by CloudBees where we heard from analysts, strategists, and clients about the state of DevOps today.

James Governor, analyst and co-founder of Red Monk (@monkchips) kicked off the event by providing a 2019 Market View on the development velocity for organizations entitled, "How to Be Elite versus Struggling." CI/CD is the key to moving faster. Agile is part of organizational transformation – smaller teams, faster iteration. DevOps is creating an environment in which development and operations work more closely together. All of this is happening in pockets – some parts of the organization are moving quickly but not the whole organization.

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Are You Using The Right Culture Model?: High Performance Redefined

The biggest challenge with Agile is culture — industry research has consistently reported this for years. Adaptation of a new way of working often doesn't blend into "business as usual." To succeed with Agile, we need to understand culture and how to navigate it. And the key question is, "Are you using the right culture model?" Or, less provocatively, "How effective is the culture model you are using?" Let's examine some commonly-used models and see how they compare.

The Schneider Culture Model? Nope.

Back in 2011 and 2012, I started to experiment with the Schneider culture model to understand and shift the organizational culture. My work and my blog post "How to Make You Culture Work"  had a huge impact on the Agile community. (Just see how many other people use this image or have made their own version by copying the words and symbols in my diagram).

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The Illusion of Agility (What Most Agile Transformations End up Delivering)

Agility is a unique and continuously evolving state that is typical to a specific organization with its people and its history. A traditional (industrial) approach to becoming more Agile commonly creates no more than an illusion of agility.

Agility is a specific state as it reflects the unique lessons and learnings that an organization and its inhabitants went and go through, the way in which specific annoyances and hindrances were and are overcome, the many inspections and adaptations that occur along the journey. Agility is a unique signature with imprints of the people involved, their relationships and interactions, used and abandoned tools, processes, practices, constructs, within and across the many eco-systems that make out an organization, and potentially stretching across the organization’s boundaries.