One of the biggest challenges to transformations in large organizations is growing competence fast enough to build on your initial successes. CSRA has implemented three programs to address talent at all levels of a DevOps transformation, including leaders and middle managers, technical resources, and our pipeline of new hires. By addressing the new skills needed to build a DevOps organization we helped drive adoption of DevOps technologies and culture across the enterprise. These programs were designed to be low cost but impactful, and drive both meaningful skill building as well as increase relationships between teams.

1. Scaling DevOps Talent
in a Large Enterprise

2. Paula Thrasher
Intel Innovation Center
@paula_thrasher
@csra_inc
#DOES17

3. 3
How can you scale talent
from small to big?
Small pocket of
DevOpsGoodness
Giant Enterprise

4. The People you Need on your DevOps Journey
4
EXECUTIVES
SENIOR MANAGERS
SENIOR TECHNOLOGISTS
MIDDLE MANAGERS
PRACTITIONERS
EARLY CAREER HIRES

5. Different Audiences – Different Skills
5
EXECUTIVES
SENIOR MANAGERS
SENIOR TECHNOLOGISTS
MIDDLE MANAGERS
PRACTITIONERS
EARLY CAREER HIRES

6. Different Audiences – Different Skills
6
EXECUTIVES
SENIOR MANAGERS
SENIOR TECHNOLOGISTS
MIDDLE MANAGERS
PRACTITIONERS
EARLY CAREER HIRES
HOW TO BE A
CHANGE AGENT

7. Different Audiences – Different Skills
7
EXECUTIVES
SENIOR MANAGERS
SENIOR TECHNOLOGISTS
MIDDLE MANAGERS
PRACTITIONERS
EARLY CAREER HIRES
HOW TO BE A
CHANGE AGENT
HOW TO LEAD A
DEVOPS TEAM

8. Different Audiences – Different Skills
8
EXECUTIVES
SENIOR MANAGERS
SENIOR TECHNOLOGISTS
MIDDLE MANAGERS
PRACTITIONERS
EARLY CAREER HIRES
HOW TO BE A
CHANGE AGENT
T-SHAPED
SKILLS
HOW TO LEAD A
DEVOPS TEAM

9. Different Audiences – Different Skills
9
EXECUTIVES
SENIOR MANAGERS
SENIOR TECHNOLOGISTS
MIDDLE MANAGERS
PRACTITIONERS
EARLY CAREER HIRES
HOW TO BE A
CHANGE AGENT
T-SHAPED
SKILLS
HOW TO LEAD A
DEVOPS TEAM
TECHNICAL
EXPERTISE

10. CSRA Learning Cohort
• Training DevOps minded leaders
• Volunteer sign up
• 8 Groups of 5 CIO staff + Coaches
• Variety of roles on the team
• Build connections across teams – meet new people
• Geographically diverse teams – virtual meetings
• Learn through training others and sharing
• Asked for deeper dives, reading and research
• How to Motivate, How to lead change, How to embrace culture

11. Chatter Group for Cross-Team Discussion
2017 CSRA Proprietary 11

12. Train Teams to Visualize the Work
and the Whole System
12
Shameless plug for Dominica’s book:
Adopting a visual
management systems
• Tracking WIP
• Visualizing Flow
• Tracking Cycle Time/Lead
Time

13. Hackathon as Training
 10 Week Learning class
 Culmination was Hackathon
 Mini-Learning Study Groups
 Learning Chatter site for each skill +
sandboxes to practice in:
• Amazon AWS
• Microsoft Azure
• RedHat (Ansible/OpenStack)
• Jenkins
• Sonotype
• Splunk
• Nutanix
• ServiceNow
13

14. Actual Competition – Team vs Team
14
Teams of 5
Cross-Functional
Brief at the end what you learned
Series of integrated tasks for points:
• Build a server in AWS
• Build server on demand using
only script no manual
• Log server data
• Hack the camera
• Connect logs to Splunk monitoring tools
• Take down another teams servers
• Survive a server takedown

15. CyberStorm
 Keep your systems up and
take the other teams systems down
 University partners and college students
 Same points model as the hackathon
 Red Team / Blue Team games
15

16. Move Teams Around = T-Shaped Talent Pipeline
University
Partnerships
Intel Innovation
Center
• Senior Developer
• Developer
• Developer
• Tester
• Sys Admin/DevOps
Program 1
• Solution Architect
• Technical Architect
• Developer
• Sys Admin/DevOps
Program 2
• Senior Developer
• Developer
• Developer
• Tester
• Sys Admin/DevOps
Training before we even hire!
Internships
CyberStorm Building
expertise
Career
growth
INCUBATOR

17. But this won’t Work Here…..
Use Free/Cheap Vendor/Tools Training
Create small budget for access to cloud sandboxes/online tools
University and Community College Partnerships
p.s. they want your help!
Learn by Doing - make learning as close to “on the job” as possible
Mentorship/Coaching/Peer Teaching Peer
CEO / CIO Leadership Recognition for obtaining new skills
These ideas don’t take a multi-million dollar training budget
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18. Putting Different Skills Together to Transform
18
HOW TO BE A CHANGE AGENT
T-SHAPED SKILLS
HOW TO LEAD A DEVOPS TEAM
TECHNICAL EXPERTISE

19. 19
How Do we Avoid Group Think and Keep Innovating?