As DevOps practitioners, we must strive to build an organization that is fast, safe, resilient, and continuously improving to best serve our customers. The results of this ensure quality, create competitive advantage, empower an energized and committed workforce, and uncover the truth. Here are five steps you can implement for a high-performing DevOps Culture.

1. 5 Steps for
High-Performing DevOps Culture

2. DevOps enables us to
push decision making
to the edges of the
organization, driving
teams to deliver more
quickly.

3. DevOps also encourages
continuous and pervasive
testing, allowing teams to
do work more safely.

4. However, an unintended result of DevOps
is cross-functional teams working closer
together than they’re accustomed to;
causing new bottlenecks, challenges,
and cultural issues.

5. DevOps teams must be
coordinated and organized.
But how?

6. Step 1: Develop Trust

7. • Be open to new ideas
• Don’t shoot the messenger

8. • Fully support and empower the
person with the most knowledge
of the work to share their
perspective with the team at large,
including their superiors.
• Take a community approach to
solving problems
• Hold “blameless postmortems”

9. • Make quality, availability, and
security everyone’s responsibility
(not just one department)
• Treat each individual on the team
as valuable

10. Step 2: Experiment Often

11. • This is how an organization
learns, adapts and evolves
“Out-experiment”
the competition.

12. • Build “safe systems” at work, which
allow you make changes and deploy
code at any time of the day without
risking a catastrophic collapse
When experimenting, always wear
safety goggles!

13. Step 3: Maintain Safety

14. • Detect and correct problems before they
get bigger and before a customer is
impacted
Half of good safety is
early detection.

15. • Encourage clear communication on
potential issues throughout the entire
value stream
Your best detection system is your staff.

16. Step 4: Encourage
Monitoring

17. “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”
Remember murphy’s law:

18. Put sufficient monitoring
in place to quickly
find out what is going
wrong, restore service,
and resume normal
operations.

19. •Especially customer metrics, so you
know exactly what customers are
experiencing and how
to improve
Follow key performance
indicators (KPIs).

20. • If something does go wrong,
figure out how to prevent it from
happening again in the
future
• Or at least enable quicker
detection and discovery
Have a culture of
relentless improvement.

21. Step 5: Support a Culture
of Learning

22. Q: What’s more important
than daily work?

23. Q: What’s more important
than daily work?
A: The improvement of
daily work.

24. • Discover best practices and
implement them
• Turn local discoveries
into global improvements
• Make efficient systems
even more efficient

25. In order to have a
culture that rewards
learning , you must
understand that learning
comes from failure.

26. Good leadership doesn’t
punish mistakes, but
a good leader must
identify mistakes and
encourage learning from
them.

27. “Failure is an option here.
If things are not failing,
you are not innovating
enough.”
-Elon Musk-

28. For high-performing
DevOps culture, implement
these 5 steps throughout your
organization.
Key Takeaway:1
3
5
2
4

29. Check out our entire eBook:
The Guide to Doing More Faster.
Now with IT Control
In this eBook, thought leaders Gene Kim (author and
DevOps evangelist), Rajat Bhargava (CEO JumpCloud),
Ben Kepes (Forbes contributor), Alan Shimel (DevOps.
com Executive Editor) discuss actionable steps for
how modern IT teams build decentralization into their
organization while maximizing the security that their IT
team needs to keep their organization safe.