August 2019CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM8IN MY Viewe've all heard about the transformational power of DevOps. Leaders are desperate to reap the rewards of this new movement and to use its promised productivity gains to speed up their release process. Recruiting departments are working hard to find this elusive skill set and to coax them onto their team. The dirty little secret about DevOps though, is your organization already has everything it needs a start its DevOps transformation. The problem isn't skills or teams. The problem is leadership. The problem is you.In the DevOps community, there is an acronym, CAMS. CAMS stands for Culture, Automation, Metrics and Sharing. These four concepts are the pillars on which all DevOps transformations are built. Many people focus on the tools and the automation, but the most important letter in this acronym is the first one, C. Without a change in culture, all of your attempts to move your organization forward will fail.If you want the benefits of DevOps, holistic change is what you're signing up for. Without it, you'll gain all of the ritual with none of the substance. Many Agile implementations have suffered a similar fate. (You still release once a quarter, but now you have a daily standup) If you're not committed to cultural change you'll deliver DevOps in name only.A definition of culture may be in order. Most companies have some sort of culture or values document that espouses their belief system. Documents and words do not make a culture, no matter how many times you repeat it. A company's culture is formed by the values and or behaviors that it rewards and punishes. Employees will generally do more of what you reward and do less of what you punish. When companies focus too heavily on the punitive side, you get a fear-based culture.Fear-based cultures are mired with notions of fault, blame and retributive justice. Failure is treated as the failing of individuals, never the failing of the complex system in which individuals operate. A poorly written requirements document is blamed on the project manager, but we never examine the larger system that let an unclear requirement document grow up to be a poorly launched product. Those failures are not on individuals but on the entire system that failed to examine the warning signs. A fear-based culture never takes that deeper level look at their organization. The fault and its correction are with individuals and as a result, you're left with an uninspired workforce too weary to try something extraordinary because the cost of failure is too high.Every successful DevOps organization I have seen has a culture of embracing failure. Only through failure and WBY JEFFERY SMITH, DIRECTOR, PRODUCTION OPERATIONS, CENTRO The First DevOps Hurdle
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