Explore the emerging best practices for leading organizational change to adopt application release and deployment. A variety of principles & practices will be described and illustrated through actual client cases.
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But how? Top 10 best leadership practices from our most successful clients. Form a team of skilled & trusted experts in the key technical practices, a CoE or a SWAT team.
• Not empire building. Literally, job is to put themselves out of business after wide org adoption of practices and automation
tools.
Establish a change agenda and guiding coalition of org leaders as stakeholders.
• Grass roots approach and a technical CoE are great; absolutely necessary. Yet insufficient.
• Accompanying sunshine, light, heat, air and nourishment are better. Ie, mission, budget, clout, and executive air cover.
Without it, the grass and its roots will die.
To motivate internally, leverage the early adopters and their success stories.
• 10x improvements are common. Eg, Deployment time from weeks to a day; days to minutes. Resources from dozens to
less than half dozen.
• See ‘Links to more information’ slide at the end. Links, facts and tools you can use to convince your org leaders.
Relentlessly embrace automation – you are going to need tools. And there are decades of work in your
backlog awaiting your creative people.
• Why should they be trapped doing mundane, manual script running topped with added excitement of vilification by the
leaders for errors?
• Life’s too short, the backlog too great, the stakes too high, and computers are great at this.
Do a Proof of Concept. Automation is new in this part of the workflow – be sure it fits your org
8 Source: Common best practices from 10 Client led DevOps Deploy sessions during Innovate 2014, client UrbanCode case studies, and 1x1 client interactions.
But how? Top 10 best leadership practices from our most successful clients. Develop an ROI case to win friends and influence people in the CFO’s staff.
• Returns go directly to economic performance and the bottom line.
• See ROI whitepaper and calculator in the ‘Links to more information’ at the end
Pick a key project or application, and get a quick win
• Choose a new, visible project. Try to avoid getting mired in complex, sprawling legacy apps; attack those later.
• Use DevOps CD practices and automation tool.
• WIN. Deliver it with fewer errors, more often, with fewer people. For example, to a test environment.
• …then, repeat with additional practices, environments, projects or apps.
Measure! Common mindsets among stakeholders:
• “In God we trust. Everyone else bring data.” and
• “If you can’t measure it, you don’t understand it and can’t manage it.”
Communicate regularly the progress and wins with the stakeholders, and with the broader org.
• DevOps automation approach begins to sell itself.
• CoE or SWAT team will get a backlog. Good problem to have.
Celebrate, and have fun. Combine those repeated quick wins & comm into celebration events.
• Change initiatives are hard work, and high risk.
• With practice, you will get good at this. And that is fun -- Mastery is very rewarding and fulfills us.
9 Source: Common best practices from 10 Client led DevOps Deploy sessions during Innovate 2014, client UrbanCode case studies, and 1x1 client interactions.