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Lean Culture Change

We all know culture is a huge part of DevOps.  What we don't know is how to change it.  The easy answer is change culture just like you would "eat an elephant",  one bite at a time.  What this does not tell you is where it start.  Do you start with the thigh, leg, tail or even the head?  This is where you should look at culture change just like any other lean process improvement.  Here are some examples:


  • Focus on the value to the customer
    • This will help you sale why DevOps is important to the company.  There are plenty of information and statistics of how DevOps is changing the industry.  Do your research and be prepared when a decision is made that is anti-DevOps.  Try to right the ship and stir it a little closer to DevOps.  Keep iterating through these opportunities over time.
  • Respect and Engage People
    • Culture change and job change is scary.  You will meet people who hate you.  You have to be a leader that can empathize and learn to respectfully debate new changes.  Why should a traditional engineering team want to give up responsibility to developers or a DevOps team?  They don't trust you.  They may not even like you.  Find ways to sale the customer and employee value over time.  Pick small steps like managing the dev environment, writing Chef scripts or moving all their scripts into source control.  You have to see their side of the change and show them how it helps them. 
  • Improving the value stream
    • Don't try to change everything.  Start with what the company culture will let you change.  Then, wait until you need to pull the Andon cord for other changes.  If no one can see anything wrong, they will not be motivated to change it.  A recent example is letting support teams make bug fixes.  I know, I know capital versus expense, blah, blah...  I had a short debate with the a leader who was planning to outsource bug fixes for his support team.  He was dead set on it and I could see that early.  No matter what, this will go bad.  Either support will overwrite some code, not do it right, break something else, poorly test it or not follow good development practices.  A key tenet of DevOps is have the most knowledgeable people do the work.  Enterprises seems to miss this badly.  When things go wrong, bring to light how it can be done easier or better by letting those skilled and trained in the craft do features as well as bug fixes.  Remember the first two items, but keep building your case over time and opening everyone's eyes to how the change benefits the customer. 
These are just a few examples of thinking about culture changes just like lean process improvement can help you in your journey.  Start with the easy stuff that provides value and then, focus only on things that provide value when they happen.  It will take years to change a traditional IT enterprise to DevOps.  Don't try to change what is perceived to be working until you have metrics or visible waste to remove. A huge side benefit of this is your job satisfaction.  If you take a pragmatic approach, you will not feel so depressed or beat down by not making change fast enough.

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