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DevOpsDays DC will return June 8-9, 2016.

Leading people in devops

Facilitator: Holly Bazemore (@hfanelli)

Scribe: Marc Esher (@marcesher)

CAPTURE DISCUSSION NOTES, IDEAS, AND ACTION ITEMS HERE.

• Started the conversation with talking about remote work from the last session
• Importance of ground rules
  • test your mic... know your tools; can you log in to all the tools you need. If you can't, then you can't work remote that day b/c you can't do your job
  • If you see me wearing headphones, don't come into my space... don't interrupt me
  • The "chair problem": ask everyone in a circle to describe your ideal chair; everybody's idea of what a perfect chair is is different; say "Chair!" to identify when you're in violent agreement
• In meetings, identify a facilitator
• "developers hate meetings"... that means they hate nonproductive meetings.

• all meetings are optional; all meetings must have an agenda. you have the right to deny a meeting if it doesn't have an agenda

  • But that's not enough... people need to know why they're there
  • What needs to come out of this meeting... what decisions need to be made, etc.

• "Death by Meeting" -- book; helps people understand why they may or may not need to be in meetings; help understand different roles, why conflict is beneficial

• meeting behavior: passive aggressive vs aggressive aggressive; people need to learn how to be confrontational in a constructive manner

• Document the results of meetings; this is where you're starting from the next time

• engineers in meetings: sometimes tough because they have trouble articulating themselves; engineers might need help with that, especially when they get steamrolled by people who are better communicators

• it's also a people manager's job to realize when someone is getting steamrolled because of that, and they should pull back and help facilitate: "engineer, I heard you say XYZ...."

  • again, why facilitators are so important

• You need to manage the individual; everyone's different. You need to know their different styles

• "Strength Finder", book. Might be called "Find your strengths" -- by Gallup; stop focusing on weaknesses and double down on strengths

• Executives (everyone?) starting to put their "Top 10 list" publicly... "here's how I like to be communicated with..."

• Jessica: at their company, they're putting their personal develpment plan on the wiki; PDP also focus of 1:1s

• At comcast, they're encouraging people to move around the org; better to move around and learn new things than have them leave

  - have handoff planning, handoff meeting, for that individual. Very transparent, documented... "here's everything we talked about"

• Shifting topic: leadership in devops, and also: is a devops team a bad thing?

• "My title is devops manager; we have a devops group"

• guy runs the boston devops group, has seen two patterns:

  1. temporary devops group, to learn and spread the knowledge

• "guild": way to keep devopsy-types loosely aligned and learning together, but those people are embedded in different teams

• Chuck tells the story of bringing engineering and operations into one team

• "We want devops, but you can't fail". Execs who want results but none of the pain