Talk for the Capital One Community of Practice

1. 1
DevOps, Culture, and Agile 2
March Lean Agile CoP
Capital One
March 15, 2022
Lisa Cooney

2. 2

3. 3
Problems with Agile

4. 4
https://chrisjameslennon.medium.com/the-age-of-scrum-is-over-185407ad705b
https://ronjeffries.com/articles/-z022/01121/fall-of-scrum/

5. 5
● Agile’s “issues” make it
problematic.
● Organizations are torn
between hiring Agilists and
hiring DevOps people.
→ They might decide to
just hire DevOps people
and give up on Agile.
Agile is in a crisis.

6. 6
“You must have an Agile mindset!”
“You must change your culture!”
“Don’t do Agile, be Agile!”
But what are these?
And how do you do this?
Agile Refrains

7. 7
Agile had some great ideas …
… but they were not mature.

8. 8
Problems Agile Addressed Effectively

9. 9
Then These Narratives Emerged

10. 10
Harm of Frameworks
● They are not necessarily “Agile”
● New adopters - reasonably - assume
that a methodology is complete

11. 11
Agile 2 Ideas Are Not New!
http://darkagilemanifesto.org/

12. 12
Trends of the 1990s
★ Business intelligence
★ Data warehouse
★ Business objects
★ Datamarts
DATA!

13. 13
Data Lake
Machine Learning
Team
Development Teams

14. 14
Agile Cannot Scale Without DevOps
DevOps:
Techniques that enable you to validate lots of
changes to many interdependent things, and
deploy them as soon as the changes are done, at
scale, without worry, and get continuous
feedback on how well the product is running and
how much people like it.

15. 15
DevOps Cannot Replace Agile, Yet

16. 16
Agile vs Agile 2
Agile Agile 2
Excessive team focus Product, Ecosystem focus
Autonomous Teams Good leadership is paramount
Rigid extremes Nuance and context matter
Non-technical DevOps
Scrum Flow

17. 17
Agile 2 Values

18. 18
Thoughtfulness
and
prescription
18

19. 19
Outcomes and outputs
19

20. 20
Individuals
and teams
20

21. 21
Business understanding and technical understanding
21

22. 22
Individual empowerment and good
leadership
22
22

23. 23
Adaptability
and planning
23

24. 24
Agile 2 Principles

25. 25
Product Design
Those offering products and
services should feel accountable to
their customers for the impact of
defects.

26. 26
Data has strategic value.
Data

27. 27
Leadership
The most impactful
success factor is the
leadership paradigm that
the organization exhibits
and incentivizes.

28. 28
The Advocate
The Idea
Person
The Fence
Mender
The Inspirer
The
Decision
Maker
The
Questioner
The
Organizer

29. 29
Good leaders are open.

30. 30
Fit an Agile framework
to your work, your
culture, and your
circumstances.
Frameworks

31. 31
Place limits on things that cause drag.
Workflow
Create documentation to
share and deepen
understanding.

32. 32
Technical and Business Fluency
Technology delivery leadership and teams
need to understand the business.
Business leaders must understand how
products and services are built and delivered.

33. 33
People
• Respect cognitive flow.
• Both specialists and generalists are valuable.
• Foster diversity of communication and diversity of working style.
• Professional development of individuals is essential.

34. 34
What is the biggest impediment to
DevOps?
Culture!
Agile will not work unless the organization’s
culture permits and supports it

35. 35
It’s all about CONTEXT

36. 36
Human Synergistics Culture Assessment
Current State Ideal State
Constructive Styles
Encourage members to interact
with people and approach tasks
in ways that will help them to meet
their higher-order satisfaction
needs.
Passive / Defensive Styles
Encourage or implicitly require
members to interact with people in
ways that will not threaten their own
security.
Aggressive / Defensive Styles
Encourage or drive members to
approach tasks in forceful ways to
protect their status and security. z

37. 37
Putting it all together
Constructive
Culture
Agile 2
DevOps
Constructive
Culture
Agile 2
DevOps
The organization’s cultural norms are healthy and constructive.
Agile 2 ideas and behavioral norms are known
and adopted
For orgs that do business on a technology platform:
Lean and DevOps methods are widely used and used well

38. 38
Systems Thinking
Culture
Agile Leadership
Product Management
Cognitive Science

39. 39
Stay in Touch!
lisa@businessagility.institute
@Lisa Boyer Cooney