How I Fell In Love With A Report On DevOps
To think they say life stops surprising you at 40. Well in my last day of being 40 (hmmm this is perchance an early birthday present from Silicone Valley just for me…) I found out an amazing fact about myself: I can fall madly in love with a report. So in love, I’d marry it.
This is surprising to me as I’m not an academic and I have the same perception of reports as many: a gray, chart-heavy dreary writing filled with numbers and self-serving text which only appeals to those who care and those are incidentally the ones who rarely learn something from it.
You can find the report that Cupid’s arrow delivered for me yesterday here: The State of DevOps 2019 and I promise you, even if you are not an Agile and DevOps fetishist like me, you will, first of all, read it and second of all may even -really, really, really- like it. It’s nothing like the description before and it has pearl after pearl after pearl.
I think what I like best about it is that it confirms -with numbers- what the most of us in tech have known for many years and what we’ve seen business brush off with obstinance:
- Cloud is the way
- Humans matter more than the process and they need to be psychologically safe
- If you don’t embrace the new ways of work you *will* die
- If you do, you’re seeing faster success than you imagined
For us personally, it speaks about Psychological Safety, in particular, examines and re-confirms that it’s the foundation of everything. Complete with what is now my favorite illustration of the year, the report then moves into productivity but only as it derives from teams who are already psychologically safe. Hygiene. Basal. Sine qua non. The very premise of all our work now re-confirmed outside of our academic hypothesis or the one famous Google study that concluded the same.
So, of course, I love it. Then there’s the dream team that brought it about. Each and every one of those companies is winning hard, leading the way, breaking ground.
But even if one chooses to focus on the technology aspect, not the people -not sure why anyone would- the rest of 80-some pages are chock-full of stats and measurements of DevOps being the way God/Buddha/TheUniverse intended technology to be born and bettered.
To me, it’s heart-warming in a number of ways. Not only as an “I told you so” link between Agile/DevOps and Psychological Safety but as diffuse confirmation that amazing people are out there. It’s like finding unicorn tracks in the forest. People who “get it” — who think and learn and collaborate in new ways that make them super-human-like are out there and they are answering this survey and working to make themselves and their organization even better. Not news to us as we meet some every day, -yes, even in banks!- but the numbers seem refreshingly higher than ever and that means critical mass.
Business everywhere will have to stand and pay attention. The imminence of change to the future that will be the norm to our kids. Exciting stuff!
To be clear no one asked me to say a word about this or even to read it, after all, being a woman CEO in a tech company is still eyebrow-raising and people have a hard time imagining I would gleefully consume information about the five measures of SDO performance during a manicure appointment so this is not a plug, this is a plea that you all read it and wave it about and use it to change the world.
May Cupid hit you too and may your weekend be filled with feverish thoughts of change and DevOps greatness.
