DevOps is not just about tools and processes, it’s about people and their interactions. It requires a cultural shift that impacts every level in the organization and requires everyone to contribute. Watch the webex slides by Mandi Walls, author of the book “Building a DevOps culture,” to learn the key techniques for transforming the culture in your organization.

1. 5 Keys to Building a Successful
DevOps Culture
Featuring Mandi Walls

2. Today’s Speakers…
SERENA SOFTWARE INC.2
Mandi Walls
Technical Practice Manager, Chef
Author of “Building a DevOps Culture”
@lnxchk
Mark Levy
Product Marketing
Serena Software, Inc.
@deparko

3. DevOps at 50,000 Feet
It is:
a cultural and professional movement
It isn’t:
a job description, new team, or solitary
organization

4. Why DevOps
• New practices that emerged from the maturation of
web operations
• A deeper reliance on technology in more industries
• Desire from customers and stakeholders
A drive toward more
interaction,
responsiveness,
interconnectedness

5. Components of DevOps
• CAMS
• As described by John Willis in What DevOps Means To
Me, 7/16/10
• Culture
• Automation
• Measurement
• Sharing
http://www.getchef.com/blog/2010/07/16/what-devops-means-to-me/

6. Culture
• Shared values and behaviors
• There’s no right culture for DevOps, but there are
characteristics:
• Supportive
• Open to experimentation
• Flexible
• Collaborative
• Trusting
• If your organization isn’t these things, you have to build
them

7. Building or Changing Culture
• This is hard.
• No, like, seriously hard.
• Focus on behaviors and values
• Tools influence behavior
• How you use them, what you use them for, influences
values

8. Transforming Your Organization to DevOps
• Technologists love tools!
• No one can sell you a “DevOps Solution”, the “C”
part is hard work!
• Our 5 Keys:
• Setting Goals
• Gaining Executive Support
• Building Pilot Projects
• Training and Prioritization
• Outreach And Evangelism

9. Key 1: Setting Goals

10. Why Are You DevOpping?
• Focus on measurable improvements
• “We want to reduce our new-release install time
from 16 hours to 90 minutes.”
• “We want to reduce our new feature time-to-market
from 6 months to 5 days.”
• Challenging!
• Do you have the initial metrics?
• Or do things just feel wrong?

11. Good Goals
• Your goals should matter to lots of people in your
organization
• “DevOps” is really just short for
“DevProductSupportNetSecBizOps”

12. Goals in Numerous Places
• The goals you choose to focus on shouldn’t be in opposition
to any team’s individual goal
• That’s not a way to get support when you need it!
• If you don’t know what matters, talk to people!
• Broaden your scope of stakeholders
• Look for complimentary goals
Lower TTM + More testing + Fewer Bugs in Prod
=
Introducing Some Automation

13. Key 2: Gaining Executive
Support

14. Air Cover
• The right goals will get buy in
• Your DevOps transformation will need some people, some
budget, some time
• You may have to move people around, or change their
workloads

15. Skunkworks
• It’s tempting to just go for it and hope for the best
• In some organizations this definitely works!
• In others, you’ll want someone to help cut through red tape
and make resources available

16. Silos
• Exist for reasons
• If your silos are skills based,
they can become porous
• Network
• Security
• Storage
• Have to be addressed in a
constructive manner
https://www.flickr.com/photos/97367204@N06/11391488416

17. Non-Executive Influencers
• Prominent team members that people look up to
• Look for informal lines of influence
• “Let’s see what Bob thinks of that” or “We should ask Jane”
Look for the People Everyone Wants on Their Team

18. The Role of Management in a DevOps Transition
• Workload prioritization
• Influence on external teams
• “Who do I have to talk to to make this happen?”
• Managing personnel issues
• Orgs in transition may end up moving people to new teams, changing
someone’s role drastically, letting people go, or other scary things
• You want someone respected in your organization to back
your project

19. Key 3: Building Pilot
Projects

20. http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/250x250/49589360.jpg

21. Why a Pilot?
• CAMS
• Creating a Culture
• Building Automation
• Measuring all the Things
• Sharing What Happens
• If these aren’t natural to your team, you need a
place to practice

22. Picking A Pilot
• Management support
• Start small, but deep
• Flush out all the gnarly bumps in the road
• Representative of real work

23. What Makes a Good Pilot
• Working with modern platforms
• Programming language, OS version
• Also interfaces – loosely coupled upstream and
downstream
• Brand new, greenfield is good!
• Established projects with a new release are too!
• Teams are open to experimentation

24. How DevOps impacts different teams
• Development Team
• Giving them new tools
• Expecting different results
• Are they engaged in the M?!?
• Product Team
• New DevOps activities might take
time away from writing code
• Establishing priority across
multiple goals
• Operations Team
• DevOps will be more than
“Operations with more coding”
• Work often focuses on the A and
M parts of CAMS
• QA, Release Engineering
• Moving towards increasing
automation
• Requirement of advanced skills
• Customer Support
• Find things like “Customers want
more features and fixes faster” vs
“Customers demand 100%
uptime”

25. Key 4: Training and
Prioritization

26. Training
• Train everyone
• On new tools, on new workflows
• Training is part of sharing – everyone gets a
chance to have experience

27. Moving Workloads
• The folks who have to learn new things have to
have time to do it
• Some of their current work will have to be
deprioritized or moved
• Everyone on the team should get a chance to do
new stuff – don’t leave someone behind to maintain
the old stuff alone

28. Setting Expectations
• Don’t kill anyone for DevOps
• It takes time to learn new tools, no matter how
excited the team is about it
• Your entire project will take time as well

29. Helping the Lost or Disgruntled
• Any change has effects on the organizations
involved
• It’s likely that adoption and enthusiasm will not be
universal
• Up to management to incentivize, reward
• Make the hard decisions about an individual’s
future with the group

30. Hiring for DevOps?
• No.
• Expecting brand-new individual contributors to
change your culture is a losing proposition
• Organizational change can be germinated from
new leadership
• Still requires influence, credibility, the right person

31. Key 5: Outreach and
Evangelism

32. Showing Off
• Talk about your project
• Internally
• Externally
• All the time
• Use different venues
• Brown bags sessions, formal workshops, larger talks, All-
Hands
• Documents, video, graphs!

33. Tiger Team
• Help other teams navigate
• Have a multitude of skills
• Establish practice for workflows, feedback,
improvements
• Potentially act as helpdesk on new tools and
processes

34. Bonus: 3 Helpful Tips

35. Having Patience
• It will take time
• Some will be experimental
• You won’t do it perfectly the
first time

36. Engage with Management
• Use the right KPIs
• Manage to people and to
tools

37. Over Communicate
If you feel like you’re talking
about it too much, you’re
probably just about right

38. Thank You
@lnxchk

39. Check out Chef!
• Configuration management
• Linux, Windows, AIX, other Unixes
• Learn More:
• https://learnchef.opscode.com/
• https://getchef.com
• Follow us on Twitter: @chef

40. Serena Release Manager Provides Automation,
Control, Collaboration and Visualization Capabilities
Release Manager Features
40
• Single system of record for release
planning and execution
• Automate large volume, highly
repetitive tasks
• Increased collaboration with Social
views
• Calendars and timeline views of
release trains, applications releases,
environments and turnovers

41. Questions?
SERENA SOFTWARE INC.41
June 19th Webcast
Weekly Deployment
Automation Demo
July Webcast
Please use the Q&A panel to submit your questions.
Friday 10 am PT
Meet
DevOps
founder
Patrick
Debois
Live Demo on What’s New
in Serena Release Manager

42. Want to See More?
SERENA SOFTWARE, INC.42
serena.com/rlm