Leading DevOps

When you go to the gym and workout, wait, when you work out at home, you goal is to push your body to point where it is uncomfortable or failure.  This produces change in your strength or overall fitness.  If you just do what is easy, your fitness doesn't improve.   How does this apply to business?   Do you deploy changes during month ends?  Holidays? Black Friday? Do you push your teams to not be ok with even small failures? Do you push teams to never have an outage? Do you test your systems for failure? Do you test your environment for security issues? Do you challenge your people to think about the business or just their silo? Do you accept statements like, "We just need to hire more people." If you want to scale and grow your business, you have to squeeze your company to see what fails.  This is a way to make it stronger and ready for when your company takes off and has hyper growth.  The company culture has to be on...

Every company is impacted by this virus. Here are some high level ways 1. Their business model revolves around gatherings of people and they can't afford to continue. 2. Users can't work remote or companies remote work is not mature enough. 3. Service industry but there is no one to service. These are some of the big impacts I see due to Covid but every company is impacted.  There will be companies hurt and set back financially but there will be others that innovate and pivot.  This isn't a time to be slow and methodical but experiment, take risk and agile.  Companies should be hype focused and not distracted by low value items, put them on hold.  Focus on high value objects even more than ever.  Hyper focus and fast to react.   Leadership should be communicating their priorities and plans, even if they don't directly impact everyone on the team.  Don't leave people in the dark.  You never know when that engineer or ops person ha...

This is really week one of the US being impacted by Corona Virus.  3/16.  Many schools, churches and business are closed and many others are work remote.  All sports are on hold. There are two categories of people speaking out.  1. What is the big deal? 2. We need to shut everything down. I am not going to rant on either one of these because generally the right spot is somewhere in the middle. As leaders we should see were things are going and be ahead of the curve for our people.  Last week it was clear that things were about to get worse.  Many people are returning from business trips and vacations.  The community spread was going to start. This was an opportunity for leaders to show people they matter with out increasing fear. Leaders should be communicating how this virus is affecting or going to affect the business. Those that could work from home should been made to go virtual. This was a simple step to show you are important and we...