Paula Thrasher, Application Delivery Lead, CSC Paula Thrasher has spent the last 15 years trying to implement Agile cultural in the federal government. Her DevOps journey began after a career switch from application developer to IT Director, when she started trying to bridge the worlds of Development and Operations. Having worked with 16 different federal agencies and components she has seen both success and failure in IT transformation at scale. This talk is not about the successes – it’s about different ways to fail. Cultural change is hard – and real transformation requires changing how organizations work and collaborate. When transformation does succeed, it shares a common themes that make it possible.

1. Three steps to change:
Lessons from Bureaucracy
Paula Thrasher

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Paula Thrasher
Application Delivery Lead
CSC
@paula_thrasher
@csc
20+ years in IT
Agile in Federal Government since 2001
15+ Federal Agencies/Components
Former Software Developer, IT Director

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The Challenge: Fix this program
Can’t change money
Can’t change the contract
Can’t change people

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John Kotter 8-Steps to change
1. Establish a Sense of Urgency
2. Create a Guiding Coalition
3. Create a vision for change
4. Communicate the vision to gain buy-in
5. Empower broad based change
6. Generate short-term wins
7. Never let up
8. Incorporate changes into the culture

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Paula’s Three-Step Formula
1. Establish a Sense of Urgency
2. Create a Guiding Coalition
3. Create a vision for change
4. Communicate the vision to gain buy-in
5. Empower broad based change
6. Generate short-term wins
7. Never let up
8. Incorporate changes into the culture
Want to Change
Know What to Change
Awesome side effect of letting teams fix themselves
Make the Change

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Step 1:
Want to change

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Have a Crisis

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Make a Crisis

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Deployments over time

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Let a Crisis Happen

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Step 2:
Know what to change

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Ways to make people know what to
change
• Visualize the work
• Measure the work
• Find the big picture

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Visualize the work
Release Plan
Agile
Development
Everything else done to Deploy….

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Numbers work too
22.4
25.5 27.3 29.2
35.5
0.0
5.0
10.0
15.0
20.0
25.0
30.0
35.0
40.0
Sprint 1 Sprint 2 Sprint 3 Sprint 4 Sprint 5
User Story Average by Sprint
(for all Releases)
Average
Linear (Average)
Team delivered 160%
more features over five
sprints after
implementing DevOps
Improvements/
Automation

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Truth… it depends on perspective

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Step 3:
Make Change Happen

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How to Make Change Happen
• Build (Find) a good team
• Let them figure out how to manage change
• Go slay organizational dragons
• Manage your change program intentionally

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Allow the J-Curve to Happen
Satir, Virginia, et al., The Satir Model: Family Therapy and Beyond
Science and Behavior Books, 1991

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Where you will spend your time…
Automating System Slaying Organizational Dragons
< 20 hours 4 months

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Change Improvement Board

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Do not confuse the Rebel Alliance with the
Imperial Senate!

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Improvements to waste can be dramatic!
12 Hours 12 Minutes, 30 seconds
*Actual improvement from automating deployments to staging

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Catalyst Change Cycle
Find the Change Team
Change the Bureaucracy
Measure Improvement
Change Team
Improvement
Backlog
Measure Baseline
Visualize System of Work
Identify Waste
Disrupt Status Quo
Create desire to change

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5 Take Aways
• Build the “Rebel Alliance” and change program
•Want to Change
•Visualize the Change
•Make the Change
• Repeat! Repeat! Repeat!

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What I still don’t know how to do
Create and Scale DevOps “Change Agents” fast
enough………