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Communications Between Tribes
The document discusses the importance of communication and shared language in breaking down silos within government and technical organizations. It highlights that different teams often use jargon that can create barriers to collaboration and understanding. The author emphasizes the need for effective communication to improve relationships, enhance collaboration, and manage perceptions in a diverse environment.
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Communications Between Tribes
- 1. (without introducing morerisk) Communication between Tribes Puppet Gareth Rushgrove A story of silos, Devops and Government
- 2. (without introducing morerisk) @garethr
- 3. (without introducing morerisk) Gareth Rushgrove
- 4. (without introducing morerisk) Backstory The very abridged version
- 5.
- 6.
- 7. Gareth Rushgrove Gareth Rushgrove TechnicalArchitect Government Digital Service @garethr
- 8. I’m no longera civil servant. Thank you to everyone who is. Gareth Rushgrove
- 9. I learned theimportance of communication first hand; from successes, failures and relentless observation Gareth Rushgrove
- 10. - Stories fromGovernment - The importance of language - The power of stereotypes - A few Gareth Rushgrove Tips
- 11. (without introducing morerisk) Different Languages One for each silo
- 12.
- 13. Agile, lean, scrum,containers, iteration, stack, hypervisor, nosql, serverless, cloud, velocity… Gareth Rushgrove
- 14. Agile, lean, scrum,containers, iteration, stack, hypervisor, nosql, serverless, cloud, velocity… Gareth Rushgrove Developer silo
- 15. Incident, event, problem,COBIT, configuration management, capacity management, CAB… Gareth Rushgrove
- 16. Incident, event, problem,COBIT, configuration management, capacity management, CAB… Gareth Rushgrove IT silo
- 17. APT, threat model,risk, cyber, mitigation, control, kill chain, threat intelligence, opsec Gareth Rushgrove
- 18. APT, assume compromise,threat model, risk, mitigation, control Gareth Rushgrove Security silo
- 19. SPAD, MCO, GPG,CESG, CERT, GDS, IDP, DTO, 18F, USDS, IL3, OCTO, EUD Gareth Rushgrove
- 20. SPAD, MCO, GPG,CESG, CERT, GDS, IDP, DTO, 18F, USDS Gareth Rushgrove Government silo
- 21. the language andspeech, especially the jargon, slang or argot, of a particular field, group or individual Gareth Rushgrove lingo noun plural noun: lingoes
- 22. Language acts asa barrier to entry to different communities Gareth Rushgrove
- 23. Language differences reinforce organisationalsilos Gareth Rushgrove
- 24. Gareth Rushgrove Identify wordsin your organisation that are only in use in certain groups or teams Tip
- 25. (without introducing morerisk) The New Service Management Talking ITIL and agile
- 26. At GDS wetalked a lot about Design, User Research, Agile and Open Source because they were fairly new to Government Gareth Rushgrove
- 27. Gareth Rushgrove We talkeda lot about discovery and alpha because people started there
- 28. Gareth Rushgrove We hireda lot of software developers because Government had very few
- 29. Gareth Rushgrove We didn’ttalk enough about operations
- 30. We didn’t talkenough about operations (to begin with because we weren’t running anything) Gareth Rushgrove
- 31. Gareth Rushgrove Don’t takethings for granted, communicate about everything you care about Tip
- 32. Gareth Rushgrove Words oftencarry the weight of past experiences and other organisations Tip
- 33. Will the releasereally work? Gareth Rushgrove Paraphrasing one of my colleagues from 2012 ” “
- 34. Yes. We’ve doneit more than 1000 times. I’m confident it works now Gareth Rushgrove Paraphrasing me ” “
- 35. Early members ofGDS were mainly from media, startup and technology backgrounds Gareth Rushgrove
- 36. The formal languageof Service Management* was unfamiliar to most Gareth Rushgrove *Ironically, ITIL was a creation of CCTA, a UK Government agency
- 37. But practices likeautomation, developers on-call, configuration management, continuous deployment, and automated testing were second nature Gareth Rushgrove
- 38. Gareth Rushgrove Transformation oftenmeans new types of people. They will bring their own language and assumptions Tip
- 39. We cancelled oneconfiguration management effort because we couldn’t keep the spreadsheet up to date Gareth Rushgrove Remembering one conversation with an Government department ” “
- 40. The recommendation wasto move from quarterly releases to one release every 6 months Gareth Rushgrove Remembering one conversation with an Government department ” “
- 41. Oh, we usean open source configuration management tool which reports state every 30 minutes for every device Gareth Rushgrove Remembering one conversation with an Government department ” “
- 42. Overlapping words fromdifferent tribes are often a great place to start collaborating Gareth Rushgrove Tip
- 43. (without introducing morerisk) Stereotypes Understanding what people think of you
- 44. A lack ofpersonal relationships, sometimes caused by the inability to communicate, leads to stereotypes Gareth Rushgrove
- 45. a widely heldbut fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing. Gareth Rushgrove stereotype noun plural noun: stereotypes
- 46. No Gareth Rushgrove Shiny new technology! Weneed bimodal IT What grade are you?
- 47. No Gareth Rushgrove Shiny new technology! Weneed bimodal IT What grade are you? Developer
- 48. No Gareth Rushgrove Shiny new technology! Weneed bimodal IT What grade are you? Government
- 49. No Gareth Rushgrove Shiny new technology! Weneed bimodal IT What grade are you? IT
- 50. No Gareth Rushgrove Shiny new technology! Weneed bimodal IT What grade are you? Security
- 51. Some silos areorganisational Gareth Rushgrove
- 52. Many silos arepersonal Gareth Rushgrove
- 53. a fictional roguesystems administrator who takes out his anger on users and others who pester him with computer problems Gareth Rushgrove BOFH Bastard Operator from Hell
- 54. Subverting stereotypes asa way to build relationships Gareth Rushgrove Tip
- 55. (without introducing morerisk) Security Says No? Experts, intermediaries and end users
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- 57. Scaling finite expertiseis often done with stacks of paper policy Gareth Rushgrove
- 58. Making use ofstacks of paper policy often involves middlemen Gareth Rushgrove
- 59. Having direct accessto real domain experts* is awesome Gareth Rushgrove *Unfairly in my case that mean
- 60. I think you’llfind you can’t do that because of my interpretation of this wording in GPG13 Gareth Rushgrove Unfairly paraphrasing countless conversations with intermediaries” “
- 61. Let’s just ringRichard from GCHQ and see what he thinks Gareth Rushgrove ” “ Unfairly paraphrasing countless conversations with intermediaries
- 62. …! Gareth Rushgrove Paraphrasing countlessconversations with intermediaries ” “
- 63. Don’t let scarcityof expertise lead to unapproachable stereotypes Gareth Rushgrove Tip
- 64. (without introducing morerisk) Code as a Communication Medium Bridging policy and practice
- 65. The dreaded incidentseverity conversation Gareth Rushgrove
- 66. Critical, Major, Minor,P1, Sev2 Gareth Rushgrove
- 67. Stage 1 Everyone thinks everythingis critical Gareth Rushgrove
- 68. Stage 2 Everyone thinksall incidents for there own service are critical Gareth Rushgrove
- 69. (without introducing morerisk) Feature: Search @high Scenario: check search results on unified search Given I am testing through the full stack And I force a varnish cache miss When I search for "tax" using unified search Then I should see some search results @normal Scenario: check organisation filtering on unified search Given I am testing through the full stack And I force a varnish cache miss When I search for "policy" using unified search Then I should see organisations in the unified organisation filter @normal Scenario: check sitemap Given I am testing through the full stack And I force a varnish cache miss When I get the sitemap index Then It should contain a link to at least one sitemap file And I should be able to get all the referenced sitemap files GOV.UK Smoke Tests
- 70. (without introducing morerisk) Feature: Search @high Scenario: check search resul Given I am testing through And I force a varnish cach When I search for "tax" us
- 71. The ambiguous natureof the written word Gareth Rushgrove
- 72. Lots of opportunitiesfor policy as code Gareth Rushgrove
- 73. (without introducing morerisk) // Should cache responses for the period defined in a `Cache-Control: // max-age=n` response header. func TestCacheCacheControlMaxAge(t *testing.T) { ResetBackends(backendsByPriority) const cacheDuration = time.Duration(5 * time.Second) headerValue := fmt.Sprintf("max-age=%.0f", cacheDuration.Seconds()) handler := func(w http.ResponseWriter) { w.Header().Set("Cache-Control", headerValue) } req := NewUniqueEdgeGET(t) testRequestsCachedDuration(t, req, handler, cacheDuration) } CDN Acceptance Tests
- 74. (without introducing morerisk) Scenario: The application should not contain SQL injection vulnerabilities Meta: @id scan_sql_injection @cwe-89 Given a scanner with all policies disabled And the SQL-Injection policy is enabled And the attack strength is set to High And the alert threshold is set to Low When the scanner is run And the XML report is written to the file sql_injection.xml Then no Medium or higher risk vulnerabilities should be present BDD Security
- 75. (without introducing morerisk) package { 'openssh': ensure => latest } Puppet
- 76. Where possible combinepolicy with implementation Gareth Rushgrove Tip
- 77. (without introducing morerisk) Conclusions If all you remember is…
- 78. Share language asmuch as possible Gareth Rushgrove
- 79. Because sharing languagemakes shared tooling and process easier Gareth Rushgrove
- 80. And learning thelanguage of another tribe is a fantastic way of breaking down silos Gareth Rushgrove
- 81. (without introducing morerisk) What I Don’t Know How to Do Devops Enterprise Ask
- 82. What macro organisational structureslimit the emergence of silos? Gareth Rushgrove
- 83. (without introducing morerisk) Thanks Ask me questions later