Leading DevOps

Continuous Improvement The first key to DevOps leadership is never stop learning and improving.  We all know about Kaizen and if you don't, Google it.  I see our journey in IT similar to my tennis journey. A long story, that fits really well for this scenario in my life, was in 9th grade when I decided to play tennis because my friends were playing.  I had only ever played Basketball.  I practiced and played some tennis matches during the season, but a pivotal moment occurred at the end of the season when another guy and I had to play 3 matches.   The winner of 2 of the matches would be in the last spot at the district tournament.  I won the first match.  Awesome!  I let it get to my head some, yet I was winning the second match.  I had a match point and an easy overhead to win it.  I got in position like normal, and swung hard as I could because I wanted to slam the ball over the fence. Instead, I just hit the ball straight ove...

Many of you saw this blog post and said, "Heck yea"  If my leadership understood DevOps, we could start doing trunk based development, with feature flags, micro services, GitHub, Jenkins, with Chef, in Azure and deploy during our IPO.  If "They" just understood,  my world would be better.  I agree but I don't agree with "They". I started to call this blog post "The Forth Way" but I don't think it fits accurately with Gene Kim's Three Ways model.  Instead, my goal is to show we are missing a key element of DevOps and DevOps does not work without it. Main point : "You are a leader or you are not in your organization!" In upcoming post, I will explain the three key leadership traits required to grow a DevOps culture in your company, organization or team.

It finally dawned on me why people struggle with defining DevOps.  If someone is truly trying to define DevOps, they will start to realize it is different in different context.  I have tried many times and each time I slant my response to the situation or what is important to me at the time.  You have seen DevSecOps, DevTestOps, DevOpsSomething and so on.  This is because people are trying to use the fundamental point of DevOps to describe more examples of it.  This made me realize that if you view DevOps as a culture, you will start using it to define more than just "dev" and "ops" because it is a metaphor. DevOps is really a metaphor for two opposing entities that clash when required to work together because they have different goals and motivators.  Dev wants to change and Ops wants stability.  Apply the same concept to other challenges like Dev/Test, ITIL/Agile, Offense/Defense, Politics/Religion, Blacks/Whites, Husband/Wife, InSource/OutSource a...