Driving change and building a high-performance DevOps culture
I had the pleasure of listening to Mark Schwartz live at ReInvent 2019 and I was amazed by his wealth of knowledge and insights when it comes to organizational transformation.
His presentation was Driving change and building a high-performance DevOps culture and it caught my interest!
Mark Schwartz: Enterprise Strategist, Amazon Web Services.
If you’re not sure who Mark is, you may have heard of some of his books:
- The Art of Business Value
- A Seat at the Table: (IT Leadership in the Age of Agility)
- War and Peace and IT: (Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age)
If you haven’t heard of these books, you now have a new reading list :)
What I learnt (My Notes)
- Communication between leaders, middle management (“frozen middle”) and builders
- What is the job of QA?
- How to do skunk works projects (experiment at fast pace with low risk)
- What decisions makers want
- How to sell & what execs want
- Making better use of data
Driving change and building a high-performance DevOps culture (DOP207)
You can watch the same presentation I saw live — https://youtu.be/o9XgEpOj3f0.
Below is an overview of the slides/content from Mark’s presentation.
Transformational change can be driven from anywhere in an organization.
What’s essential are passion, commitment, vision, and a willingness to take on challenges.
You can categorize transformation in three ways, each with their own pros and cons:
- Top-down
- Middle
- Bottom-up
Leading from the top down
Set a strong vision and goals aligned to it
Remove impediments
Change incentives
Connect and coordinate
Mange relationships up and across
Assume all risk
Mitigating the problem of distance
Set up feedback loops
Walk around
Encourage fast escalation … nuclear option
Manage through Big Hairy Audacious Goals
Leading from the middle
Do what is possible within scope of influence
Free up resource from prototyping/POCs/reference architectures
Create a skunkworks (don’t be sneaky)
Get small wins constantly
Forge alliances
Sell up and across
Leading from the bottom up
Go ahead and make changes
Start small and work incrementally
Use changes to improve your own productivity
Create concrete benefits (e.g., reduce deployment errors)
Lower risk my banking it clear you are invested in POCs
Find collaborators, and share good practices
How to sell
Know what you’re asking for
Frame your idea in terms of how they will lead to successes
Provide actual evidence (like a POC)
Mitigate risk for the “buyer”
Think carefully about the language you use
What do executives want?
They do not care about sprints, backlogs, microservices, technical debt, or even the cloud.
They do care about revenues, costs, risks, competitive positioning.
Today’s big concerns:
- Have a growth story (revenue)
- Be future-ready to avoid disruption
- Mange today’s risks (compliance, security, etc)
- Unlock the value in their databases
Wrap Up
You can transform and you can do it today — stop making excuses. Change can be driven from anywhere in your organization. It always involves influencing other people.
