Ciaran ONeill, Agile consultant. Gave a talk on "Growing a DevOps culture". About the culture he wanted to create within his current team and how they went about trying to let this culture emerge (since you can't "create" culture directly").

1. Growing a (DevOPs)
culture
@c_g_oneill

3. What is devops culture?
Agile culture

4. What is devops culture?
Agile culture - characterised by:
● Customer focus
● High bandwidth communication
● Continuous improvement

5. Our starting point
● New team (5 system engineers, 1 developer)
● New activity (software development)
● New context (recently merged company)
● New location
● New product
● New tools (Docker, Consul)
● New process
● New PO

6. Our goal
Develop the capability to transform a customer
environment from any given state to any
desired state in minutes instead of months

7. Learning models - where were we?
● Aikido; shu-ha-ri
● Dreyfuss; novice-advanced beginner-competent-
proficient-expert
● Maslow (?) - Unconscious incompetence-
conscious incompetence-conscious competence-
unconscious competence

8. Learning models - where were we?
● Aikido; shu-ha-ri
● Dreyfuss; novice-advanced beginner-competent-
proficient-expert
● Maslow (?) - Unconscious incompetence-
conscious incompetence-conscious competence-
unconscious competence
Implies coaching by context free instruction, “Do it like this”

10. Probing the complex domain
● Customer focus - On-site customer
● High bandwidth communication - Co-located,
dedicated, x-fnc team
● Continuous improvement - One week sprints

11. Probing the complex domain
On-site customer
Negative patterns (dampen) Positive patterns (amplify)
Customer not on-site Customer available (daily)
Demonstrating work done Review comprises demo of working features and
discussions on product direction
Technical “stories” User Stories, (quantified) business value as main
prioritisation tool
Communication by documentation Extensive collaboration with (future) end users
Customer as The Other Customer as guide

12. Probing the complex domain
Co-located, dedicated, x-fnc team
Negative patterns (dampen) Positive patterns (amplify)
Communication by mail Animated stand-ups
Communication by service desk tool Whiteboard huddles;l
Documentation instead of
collaboration/conversation
Pairing at work stations
Role play (“not my job”) Liquid sub-teams
Fear (“only X knows that/it will be so much
quicker if X does it”)
Tasking that facilitates knowledge sharing, risk
mitigation

13. Probing the complex domain
Negative patterns (dampen) Positive patterns (amplify)
Stories spanning multiple sprints Stories DONE
No customer at review PO, stakeholders & users at review;l
Retrospectives skipped Retrospective every sprint
Lack of improvement experiments Improvement stories in every sprint, evolving
definition of DONE, explicitly allocate learning
time in-sprint
Static or ever-growing impediment backlog Actively managed impediments
One week sprints

14. How’s it going?
● Customer focus - proving difficult to achieve
and maintain, latest developments are
promising, getting to production is key
● High bandwidth communication - good,
tipping embedded, within the team
● Continuous improvement - well established,
we’re forever hunting for feedback
mechanisms

15. References
The As-If Principle - Richard Wiseman (UK, US)
‘Pencils’: Strack, F., Martin, L.L., and Stepper, S (1988). ‘Inhibiting and facilitating conditions of the human smile: A
nonobstrusive test of the facial feedback hypothesis’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 768-77.
A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making: David J. Snowden, Mary E. Boone, Harvard Business Review
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin
Novice to Expert: the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, Stan Lester
A FIVE-STAGE MODEL OF THE MENTAL ACTIVITIES INVOLVED IN DIRECTED SKILL ACQUISITION, Stuart E.
Dreyfus and Hubert L. Dreyfus