Culture is very important in DevOps. It is the first thing in every definition of DevOps, but how can you measure it? Culture is intangible, hard to change, and it is of vital importance to your company and your employee’s satisfaction. Everyone agrees that a culture of trust and collaboration is key to a successful DevOps transformation. Having a culture of collaboration where people feel safe to share their views and work across a diverse group is a must for a successful organization. But how do we measure culture? In this session we will talk about the culture of DevOps and how the culture enable information flow through organizations. We talk about the Westrum Typology of Organizational Culture and how organizational culture predicts the way information flows through an organization. We’ll talk about how to measure your culture based on the Westrum Typology and steps to move to a generative culture of high trust and high collaboration across the organization.

1. Modeling and Measuring
DevOps Culture
“To change the culture you have to change the organization”
– Scaled Agile

2. Bio • Email: Leland.newsom@yahoo.com
• Twitter: @LelandNewsom
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lelandnewsom/
• Slideshare: https://www.slideshare.net/LelandNewsom
• Past roles include:
• Developer
• Manager
• Managing Director
• Technical Director

3. What’s Your Definition of Organizational Culture?

4. Examples of When Values Differ from Behaviors
• Value work life balance – but has team events after work
• Value a learning culture – has lunch and learns and pays for other
ways to learn on your personal time
• Value doing it right – but rewards the firefighters
• Values teamwork – but individual performance management
compares individuals
• Values innovation – but doesn’t give time for exploration or allow for
failures
• Values quality – but pushes un-realistic delivery dates or doesn’t
allow for time for practices like TDD

5. 7
Definition
DevOps is those set of cultural
norms and technology
practices that enable the fast
flow of planned work from,
among others, development,
through tests into operations
while preserving world class
reliability, operation, and
security.

7. Before DevOps Culture
• DevOps Culture is about collaboration between Development and
Operations.
• Under the traditional separation between Dev and Ops, Dev and Ops have
different and opposing goals
Development
Speed
Operations
Stability

8. After DevOps Culture
• DevOps Culture is about collaboration between Development and
Operations.
• With DevOps, Dev and Ops work together and share the same goals.
Speed and Stability
Development and Operations

9. Google’s Aristotle Project
• 2 year study of 180+ active Google
Teams to answer, “What makes a
team effective at Google?”
• “Who is on the team matters less
than how the team members
interact, structure of their work, and
view their contributions.”
• It all comes down to team dynamics
and how culture influences those
dynamics.
• High level of psychological safety
• Culture of collaboration &
experimentation is key
https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful-google-team/

11. What is DevOps Culture
• Shared values and behaviors
• There’s no right culture for DevOps,
but there are characteristics:
• Respect and Trust
• High Psychological Safety
• High Cooperation
• Open Communication
• Collaboration
• Flexible
• Supportive
• Open to experimentation
• Continuously improving
Continuous
Experimentation
Amplify Feedback LoopsSystem Flow
Lean & Agile Principles Product Centric
Continuous Flow and Visibility
Culture Practices
Performance Oriented
Innovative
Sharing
High Trust
Culture
High Cooperation
Collaboration
Continuously Improving
Empowered Employees
Infrastructure
Automation
Continuous Delivery
Monitor Everything
Release Management
Version Control
Everything
Trunk Based
Development
Continuous Integration
Continuous Testing
Reduced Lead Time for Changes
DevOps
Business Enabling Responsiveness
Modified from: https://devops.com/interconnect-2016-culture-matters/

12. What is DevOps Culture
• Shared values and behaviors
• There’s no right culture for DevOps,
but there are characteristics:
• Respect and Trust
• High Psychological Safety
• High Cooperation
• Open Communication
• Collaboration
• Flexible
• Supportive
• Open to experimentation
• Continuously improving
• If your organization isn’t these
things, you have to build them.
Continuous
Experimentation
Amplify Feedback LoopsSystem Flow
Lean & Agile Principles Product Centric
Continuous Flow and Visibility
Culture Practices
Performance Oriented
Innovative
Sharing
High Trust
Culture
High Cooperation
Collaboration
Continuously Improving
Empowered Employees
Infrastructure
Automation
Continuous Delivery
Monitor Everything
Release Management
Version Control
Everything
Trunk Based
Development
Continuous Integration
Continuous Testing
Reduced Lead Time for Changes
DevOps
Business Enabling Responsiveness
Modified from: https://devops.com/interconnect-2016-culture-matters/
If we don’t
pay
attention to
culture
The
practices
will not
reach their
full
potential

13. Pathological
(Power-oriented)
Bureaucratic
(Rule-oriented)
Generative
(Performance-oriented)
Low cooperation Modest cooperation High cooperation
Messengers shot Messengers neglected Messengers trained
Responsibility shirked Narrow responsibilities Risks are shared
Bridging discouraged Bridging tolerated Bridging encouraged
Failure leads to scapegoating Failure leads to justice Failure leads to inquiry
Novelty crushed Novelty leads to problems Novelty implemented
Typology of Organizational Culture (Westrum, 1994)

14. What Does Westrum’s Organizational Culture Predict?
• Westrum’s theory hypothesizes that
organizations with better information flow
function more effectively.
• The most critical issue for organizational safety is
the flow of information
• Generative organizations have good information
flow, high cooperation and trust
• Culture can predict both software delivery
performance and organizational performance.
• Mirrors the research performed by Google into
how to create high-performing teams
• Software Delivery Performance measured by:
• Deployment Frequency
• Lead Time for Changes
• MTTR
• Change Failure Rate
• Organization performance is correlated with
deployment pain. The more painful code
deployments are, the poorer the culture.
Westrum
Organizational
Culture
Organizational
Performance
Software
Delivery
Performance

15. How Organizations Respond to Anomalous Information
1. “Shoot the messenger”
2. If messenger wasn’t executed, information might be isolated.
3. If message got out, it could be “put in context” through PR strategy.
4. Only fix the immediate event (local fix)
5. Look for other examples of the same thing and fix (global fix)
6. Engage in inquiry, to not only fix the current event, but also it’s underlying root
cause.
Scale of reactions:
Suppression Public Relations Global Fix
**@***************@***************@***************@***************@***************@**
Encapsulation Local Fix Inquiry
Westrum, Ron. (2014). The study of information flow: A personal journey. Safety Science. 67. 58–63. 10.1016/j.ssci.2014.01.009.

16. How to Measure Westrum Organizational
Culture in a Statistically Valid & Reliable Way
Use a scale from “1=Strongly Disagree” to “7=Strongly Agree”:
• On my team, information is actively sought.
• On my team, failures are learning opportunities, and messengers of them are not
punished.
• On my team, responsibilities are shared.
• On my team, cross-functional collaboration is encouraged and rewarded.
• On my team, failure causes inquiry.
• On my team, new ideas are welcomed.
These questions come from peer-reviewed research by Nicole Forsgren. More info can also be found in the
book “Accelerate” by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim
3-Somewhat
Disagree
2-Disagree
1-Strongly
Disagree
4-Neutral
5-Somewhat
Agree
6-Agree
7-Strongly
Agree

17. How to Build a Generative Culture
Characteristics of a
Generative Culture
DevOps Practices
High Cooperation Cross-functional teams. Create cross-functional teams that include representatives from each functional area
of the software delivery process.
Messengers trained Blameless Postmortems. By removing blame, you remove fear, you enable teams to more effectively surface
problems and solve them. Mistakes happen; holding blameless postmortems or blameless problem
solving/issue resolution is a valuable way to learn from mistakes.
Risks are Shared Shared Responsibility. Quality, availability, reliability, and security are everyone’s job. The improvement in
collaboration that comes from sharing responsibility inherently reduces risk.
Bridging encouraged Breaking down silos. In addition to creating cross-functional teams, techniques for breaking down silos can
include co-locating or embedding ops with the dev team or including ops in planning throughout the software
delivery lifecycle.
Failure leads to inquiry Blameless postmortems. Your response to failure shapes the culture of the organization. The more you focus
on the conditions in which failures happen, as opposed to blaming individuals for failures, the closer you’ll get
to creating a generative culture.
Novelty implemented Experimentation Time. Giving employees freedom to explore new ideas can lead to great outcomes. Some
companies give engineers time each week for experimentation. Others host internal hack-a-thons or hold
internal conferences to share ideas and collaborate.
Jesse Newland, “ChatOps at Github” March 26, 2013
https://www.slideshare.net/DevOpstastic/how-devops-drives-organisational-change

18. 5 Steps for Creating a High-Performing DevOps Culture
1. Build Trust and Make Psychological Safety a
Priority
• Be open to new ideas
• Don’t shoot the messenger
• Take a community approach to solving problems
• Push decisions to who has the information
• Hold “blameless postmortems”
• Everyone responsible for quality
• Treat each individual on the team as valuable
equals
2. Support a Culture of Learning & Sharing
• Uncover better ways of working and implement
them
• Turn local discoveries into global improvements
• Encourage learning from mistakes
• Encourage sharing and create opportunities to
share information
• Invest in everyone’s growth and learning
• Improve flow of information and communication
channels
3. Experiment Often
• “Out-experiment the competition”
• Build “safe to fail” systems that let you build and
deploy small changes
• Use experimentation as a way to learn and pivot
4. Make Monitoring and Recovery a Priority
• Put sufficient monitoring in place to quickly find
out what is going wrong, restore service and
resume operations
• Detect and correct problems before customer
impact
5. Break down silos
• Build cross-functional teams
• Embed Ops with development teams
• Dev assist with deployment, monitoring, and
recovery
• Ops included in sprint planning, software design,
testing, and feature development

19. Agility Health Radar – DevOps Assessment
• The AHR DevOps assessment provides a
way to capture the Culture of
Improvement dimension quantitatively
• Efficiency & Collaboration
• Global Sharing
• Collective Ownership
• Process Effectiveness
• Cross-Functional Teams
• Enabling Business Agility
• Leadership
• Impediment Mgmt.
• Tech Debt. Mgmt.
• Enabling Innovation
• Risk Taking
• Feedback Loops
• Learn & Experiment

21. Culture Changes Are Hard and Take Time
• Culture lags because people need
to see the new way of working is a
better way of working
• Don’t try to change old habits –
replace them with new, competing
habits and let the old habits fade
away
• Create experiments to demonstrate
the benefits of new habits
• Measure outcomes from experiments
and pivot or persevere based on
learnings from empirical evidence
• Celebrate small wins

22. Continuously Improve
“Continuous Improvement is better than delayed perfection.
₋ Mark Twain

23. Satir J-Curve
Time
Performance

24. Learn More
• 2017 State of DevOps Report
• https://puppet.com/resources/whitepaper/state-of-devops-report
• Interconnect 2016: Culture Matters
• https://devops.com/interconnect-2016-culture-matters/
• A Scientific Approach to IT Performance, Nicole Forsgren
• https://devops-research.com/research.html
• The study of information flow: A personal journey, Ron Westrum
• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261186680_The_study_of_information_flow_A_personal_journey
• Using the Westrum typology to measure culture
• https://www.andykelk.net/devops/using-the-westrum-typology-to-measure-culture
• Which Comes First DevOps or Culture Change – Information Week
• https://www.informationweek.com/devops/which-comes-first-devops-or-culture-change/a/d-id/1328714
• What is your organizational culture: Pathological, Bureaucratic, or Generative?
• http://www.talenttalks.net/organizational-culture-pathological-bureaucratic-generative/
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