Leading DevOps

My idea security situation is one that never needs an audit.  It should be proactive and not let you hurt your self or require you follow a "Policy".  The future, especially in cloud environment, should be solutions like Chef Compliance and Dome 9 Security .  I am not saying these solutions are the ones you should pick but they are the ones that in body the principles you should have.  Your environment should be one that never gets audited.   It only tests your security controls.  Even the test could be automated, so that you can prove your compliance is in place and your new admin can't open port 3389 on your firewall or grant god permissions to accounts in your environments. "This will never be us!!"  I hope you don't think this.  As I have said many times, this is a journey of continuous improvement.  Find ways to meet compliance through automation and prevention.

DevOps needs to go away.  It is lasting longer than I thought and that is bad.  DevOps is the way IT should just be, successful IT.  DevOps is like saying we should be good people and care for each other.   It is just something we all know we should do but some do it great and others are bad at it.  IT should just be better by automate everything, have empathy and continuous improvement.  I am pationate about this because DevOps is associated with app dev and ops but all IT should be run this way.   So yes, DevOps should die and IT should just get its act together and be successful.

After thinking through our interviewing process, previous company process and interviews I have gone on in the last few years, I see interviewing as a complete failure at most companies. Obviously the interview process depends on the role but there is really no way you can spend 30 minutes on the phone, an hour team interview and a 30 minute executive interview with someone and decide if they are a good or bad candidate.   Honestly the more senior the role, the more time you should spend with them. I want to give a few tips to interviewees and interviewers. Interviewees - You are interviewing them Dress up no matter the role.  Don't ware jeans unless the company has specifically told you to do that.  If it is a manager or higher role, wear a suit.   Make sure you interview the people you talk to.  Find out if you want to work with them and their role compared to yours.   Understand the day to day responsibilities and long term expectations of t...

Empathy This is the key to success.  You have to try to understand everyone around you.  To do this, you have to listen and have empathy for their POV.  Without this, you can't gain their trust and respect.

Faith It is simple.  You have to have Faith that you can improve your self, team or company every day.

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.