Leading the Horses to Drink: A Practical Guide to Gaining Support and Initiating a DevOps Transformation

Abstract:

Do these tales of woe sound familiar?:

"I can't get my managers to support my DevOps efforts"

"Company politics prevent me from getting help from other teams"

"People say they are too busy getting real work done to worry about a fad called DevOps"

"Our CIO wants 30 deployments per day and told me I have until next quarter to to buy and implement the DevOps tool to make it happen"

These are all actual examples from companies lacking organizational alignment. A lack of organizational alignment is the #1 killer of DevOps dreams and good intentions. Left unchecked, a lack of organizational alignment will undermine any improvement efforts you attempt and continuously generate more disfunction throughout your organization.

So what can you do? Organizational alignment sounds like a a complicated and daunting culture issue, doesn't it? Where do you start and how can you make progress?

In this presentation, I'll be walking you through a proven set of design patterns for building organizational alignment. You'll walk away from this presentation with the outline of a plan that you can adapt and apply to your own organization. No special people skills or management kung-fu required.

Your path to organizational alignment will contain three "acts":

Act 1: Making the case -- getting buy-in from your colleagues, support from your managers, and the budget to bring a plan to life

Act 2: Learning to see -- getting the entire organization (up and down the management chain as well as across the value stream) to see the actual problems in the same way and talk about those problems using the same language.

Act 3: Solution design and execution - getting the entire organization to embark on continuous improvement (and to stay on course!)

Speaker:

Damon Edwards is a co-founder of DTO Solutions and has spent over 13 years working on both the technology and business ends of web operations. DTO Solutions specializes in DevOps and automated infrastructure consulting for large-scale and mission critical IT operations. DTO clients include leading e-commerce, financial services, and gaming companies such as Adobe, JPMorgan Chase, Zynga, Cisco WebEx, Williams-Sonoma, and CCP Games. Damon is a frequent conference speaker and contributor to the dev2ops.org blog where he focuses on DevOps and operational process topics. Damon is also active in the international DevOps community, including co-organizing DevOps Days conferences and co-hosting the DevOps Cafe podcast.