This talk was given at Barcamp 2015 in Saskatoon, SK Canada by Melanie Cey. It's a bit of a self guided story or two about how I feel about changing cultures of blame to cultures of innovation and working together to achieve goals instead of working against each other.

1. Devops, Empathy,
Innovation
and other sappy stuff from the trenches of web
operations.
@melaniemj

2. What is Devops?

3. Empathy
“the ability to understand and share the feelings
of another”

4. But how do we share needs?
hint: we all work for the same company

5. the ability to understand and share the < ---- >
of another team or colleague
goals

6. the ability to understand and share the < ---- >
of another team or colleague
process

7. the ability to understand and share the < ---- >
of another team or colleague
needs
what else???

8. Empathy
what about the bad stuff?

9. the ability to understand and share the < ---- >
of another team or colleague
failures

10. Empathy
“the ability to understand and share the
successes of another team or colleague”
“the ability to understand and share the failures
of another team or colleague without blame”

11. Empathy
… A ridiculous example of empathy as it
pertains to systems understanding

12. We think it’s “the database”
How is “the database” responsible for the
performance of the code you we wrote?

13. We think it’s “the database”
How do you think “the database” operates
without your our code?

14. We think it’s “the database”
It doesn’t, it doesn’t have a purpose without our
code...
So, who is responsible for the performance of
“the database”?

15. Cultures of Blame
Who here has
- lost a colleague to culture?
- left a job because of culture?

17. Have you ever
had the feeling that if you could just change
your culture or ecosystem that your team would
be so. much. better?

18. Did your environment
lack the security or protection to take risks?

19. Did your environment
result in blame or shame instead of learning
from mistakes?

20. Did your environment
lack sense or knowledge of greater purpose?

21. Did your environment
suck? Tell me how it sucked and why.

22. Innovation
@brantcooper #leanux15 (via @jezhumble)

23. Change it
- Say we instead of you
- Encourage bold behaviour from others
- Reward success and learn from failure
- ...
- If you don’t feel secure or protected… find a
new gig

24. Remove Barriers to Empathy
- Remove wait states between teams
- Form common goals
- Communicate your critical paths
- Share reasons for failures (rather than hiding
and/or finger pointing)

25. This talk was not about Devops
Melanie Cey
@melaniemj
Senior Systems Analyst, Systems Reliability
Engineering @ Yardi
We use Icinga, ELK, nxlog, nsclient and graphite to monitor >5,000 clients,
>10,000 VMs and >60,000 services running on windows. Ask me how.